How to get your product mentioned by ChatGPT and other AI tools
More people now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "what's a good tool for X" instead of searching Google. If your product isn't in the answer, for that person it doesn't exist. I've spent the last few days working on this for overbid.in, so here is what I did and why. I can't promise any of it gets you mentioned. Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how they pick what to show. But all of it is cheap, and none of it can hurt.
One thing helps to understand first. These tools answer in two ways. Some answers come from what the model learned during training, which you can't change quickly. Others come from a live search the tool runs while answering, and that part you can influence, because it works a lot like ordinary search.
Get into Bing, not just Google
Most founders set up Google Search Console and stop there. But ChatGPT's search and Microsoft Copilot lean on Bing's index, so if Bing hasn't crawled your site, those answers can't see you. Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools, add your site, and send your sitemap. You can import your site straight from Google Search Console, which takes two minutes.
When I did this, Bing showed overbid.in as "discovered but not crawled", which means it knew the site existed but hadn't read it yet. That's normal for a new site, and it's exactly why the next step is worth doing.
Tell search engines the moment something changes
IndexNow is a simple, free way to tell Bing and a few other search engines that a page is new or has changed, instead of waiting for them to come back on their own. You put a key file on your site and send a small request with the addresses that changed. On overbid.in, every time a brand is listed or edited, its page and its category page are sent along within a minute. If your site runs on WordPress or a big host, there's probably a plugin or a setting that does this for you.
Make sure the words are in the page
If your site builds its content with JavaScript after it loads, many crawlers see an almost empty page. Open your page, choose "View page source", and check that your product name, what it does and your main text are actually in there. If they aren't, look at server-side rendering or a static export of the important pages.
Also check your robots.txt. Some site builders and security settings block AI crawlers by default. If you want to be found by these tools, don't block the crawlers they use to search.
Say plainly what your product is
AI tools repeat what they can read, so give them something clear to repeat. Somewhere on your site, ideally your home page, write one sentence that says what the product is, who it's for and where: "X is a tool that helps Y do Z." Skip slogans that only make sense once you already know the product.
Answer the questions people actually ask, in plain words, on pages of their own: what it costs, how it's different from the obvious alternative, who it's for, how to get started. A good FAQ page does a lot of this. When someone asks a chatbot one of those questions, a page that answers it directly is easy to quote.
Add structured data
Structured data is a small block of code in your page that describes it in a format machines read easily: this is an organization, this is its name, its logo, its website, what it does. Search engines have used it for years, and it doesn't take long to add. On overbid.in, every brand page describes the brand as an organization, with its site, logo, description and category, and the FAQ pages are marked up as questions and answers.
Try an llms.txt file
llms.txt is a newer idea: a plain text file at your-site/llms.txt that explains your site to AI tools in a few paragraphs and links to the pages that matter. It isn't an official standard, and I can't tell you how many tools read it today. But it takes half an hour, and it forces you to write down clearly what your site is, which is useful anyway. You can see the one for overbid.in as an example.
Be mentioned on other sites
When an AI tool searches the web for "best X tools", it mostly finds lists, directories, reviews and discussions, not your home page. So the more of those places describe your product correctly, the better your chances. List it on directories and launch sites in your field, answer questions on Reddit where it's genuinely relevant, and write a short, accurate description you can reuse everywhere, so every listing says the same thing.
overbid.in is one of those places, and it's mine, so weigh this accordingly: every listed brand gets its own page with its name, tagline, description and category in plain text, it appears on its category page, and it's included in the site's llms.txt. You can list your brand free by posting about it.
What not to do
Don't stuff pages with keywords, publish hundreds of thin AI-written pages, or plant fake reviews and comments. Search engines have been punishing that for years, and the AI tools built on top of them inherit those filters. And don't expect results in a week. It can take a while for a new site to be crawled at all.
I'll write again once I know what actually made a difference for overbid.in. If you've had your product show up in a ChatGPT or Perplexity answer, I'd love to hear what you think did it: hello@overbid.in.
Ankit