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Shopify articles post themselves →A customer telling you "ChatGPT recommended you" is a pleasant surprise. A customer telling you it recommended a competitor is a problem you want to fix quickly. If you are wondering how to get mentioned in ChatGPT, the honest answer is less mysterious than most of the advice circulating: assistants recommend businesses whose websites state, in plain words, exactly what they do, for whom, where, and on what terms. Your competitor probably got the mention because their site says those things and yours implies them.
We covered the broader mechanics in How to Get Mentioned in ChatGPT Answers: A Practical Guide. This piece is narrower: it explains why the competitor is winning right now, and gives you a checklist you can apply to your own pages this week.
Where ChatGPT gets its answers from
There are two routes into an assistant's answer. The first is training data, the enormous snapshot of the web the model learned from. You cannot influence that on any useful timescale, so set it aside.
The second route matters far more. When someone asks a recommendation question, something like "best IT support company for a small accountancy firm in Leeds", modern assistants usually run a live web search, read a handful of pages, and summarise what they find. ChatGPT does this with web search enabled. Perplexity searches on almost every query. Google's AI Overviews are built directly on Google's own index.
That changes the question entirely. You are not trying to get inside a model's head. You are trying to be one of the handful of pages a search retrieves and an assistant can confidently quote. That is a writing and website problem, and it is fixable.
Why the competitor got the mention
Open the competitor's site next to yours and the difference is usually obvious once you know what to look for. Their service page says something like "we provide IT support for firms of 10 to 50 staff across West Yorkshire, with a one-hour response target and pricing from a stated monthly figure per user". Yours says "award-winning technology solutions tailored to your business".
An assistant can quote the first sentence. It cannot do anything with the second. Assistants do not read between the lines, infer your pricing, or guess your service area from your phone number's dialling code. If a fact is not written on the page, then as far as the assistant is concerned it does not exist.
Rule of thumb: if a stranger could not answer "what do they do, for whom, where, and roughly at what price" after sixty seconds on your site, an AI assistant cannot either.
Marketing fluff fails for a second reason too. Retrieval works by matching the searcher's question to text on a page. Nobody asks an assistant for "tailored solutions". They ask specific, long-tail questions: how much does managed IT support cost, who covers Microsoft 365 migrations near me, what is a reasonable response time. Pages written in the language of those questions get retrieved. Pages written in the language of a brand brochure do not.
How to get mentioned in ChatGPT: the changes that work
Write pages that answer one specific question each
A single page that plainly answers "what does outsourced IT support cost for a ten-person firm?" will outperform a general services page for that question every time. Give the direct answer near the top, then the detail: what drives the price up or down, what is included, what is not. One question, one page, answered properly.
State the facts an assistant needs to recommend you
Somewhere easy to find, in plain HTML text rather than an image or a PDF, your site should state: exactly what you offer, who it suits (company size, sector, situation), the geographic area you serve, indicative pricing or at least a pricing model, and anything measurable you commit to, such as response times. If you cannot publish exact prices, publish a range or a "from" figure. Vagueness here is what hands the mention to someone else.
Make sure crawlers can actually read your site
Check your robots.txt file, the small text file at yoursite.com/robots.txt that tells crawlers what they may fetch. Some sites, often on a developer's well-meaning advice, block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot outright. Blocking them removes you from consideration. Also confirm your key pages appear in Google's index, since AI Overviews and several assistants lean on it, and that your important text is served as real HTML rather than loaded only by JavaScript, which some crawlers handle poorly.
Keep your business details consistent
Your business name, location, services and contact details should match across your site, your Google Business Profile and any directories you appear in. Assistants cross-reference. Inconsistency does not disqualify you, but it lowers confidence, and confidence is what gets a business named rather than described vaguely.
Worked example: an IT support firm replaces "trusted technology partner for growing businesses" with "managed IT support for firms of 5 to 50 staff in Manchester and Cheshire, priced per user per month, with remote response inside one hour". Nothing else changes. That single sentence gives an assistant everything it needs to match the page to a real question and quote it.
The checklist to run this week
- Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google the three or four questions your customers actually ask, phrased the way they phrase them, and record who gets mentioned.
- Open the pages the assistants cite and note the specific facts they contain that your equivalent pages do not.
- Check yoursite.com/robots.txt and remove any blocks on GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
- Confirm your main service pages are indexed by Google using a site: search or Search Console.
- Rewrite one service page so the first paragraph states plainly who it is for, where, what is included and roughly what it costs.
- Add a short FAQ to that page answering the three questions prospects ask on every sales call, in the words they use.
- Publish one article that answers a single specific buyer question from start to finish.
- Re-run your test questions in three or four weeks and compare.
What not to bother with
Skip anything sold as a shortcut. Hidden text addressed to AI models, paid "get listed in AI search" schemes, and keyword-stuffed pages either do nothing or actively hurt you. There is no submission form for ChatGPT, and no one can guarantee a mention. The only durable lever is the boring one: clear, specific, honest pages that answer real questions, on a site crawlers can read.
It is also worth saying that one rewritten page will not transform things overnight. Retrieval favours sites with depth on a topic, which is why the businesses that get mentioned consistently tend to be the ones publishing steadily, not the ones that fixed a single page once.
Where Helio SEO fits in
Helio SEO exists for the last item on that checklist and everything after it: it scans your site, works out the specific questions your buyers ask, and writes and publishes one plainly worded article a day in your voice, with every draft approved by you first. If you have the time to write those pages yourself, the checklist above is all you need. If you do not, that is the gap we fill.