How to Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Business: GEO in Poland
How to get into ChatGPT answers: what drives citations, what not to buy, a checklist for a Polish business, measurement, and a 90-day plan.
In short
ChatGPT, Copilot, and other assistants don’t have a ranking you can climb. Every time, they assemble a short list of two or three names from what other sources say about you: Google reviews, industry directories, local media, forums, YouTube. Third-party mentions correlate with showing up in Google AI Overviews about three times more strongly than links, and about 85% of a brand’s visibility in AI answers comes from outside its own site. Your site matters through freshness and structure, though about 73% of sites have technical barriers that make it harder for AI bots to reach them. A position can’t be promised: only about 30% of brands hold their spot across two consecutive answers. Below is a checklist, a way to measure it, and a 90-day plan for a Polish business.
How ChatGPT decides who to recommend
When a user types “looking for an accountant for a sole proprietorship in Poznań, IT industry, want everything online,” the assistant doesn’t show ten links. It uses Bing as an external search data provider and its own OAI-SearchBot crawler, reads pages accessible to its bots, weighs that against what it knows from training, and writes two or three names with a one-sentence justification. Often without a link. The user then types the name into Google or picks up the phone.
That changes three things compared with SEO. The question is longer and more specific, so the assistant needs evidence for specifics: prices, scope, location, and reviews about that exact scope. The answer has room for two or three spots, so fourth place means invisibility. And a large share of the value leaves no trace in analytics as “traffic from ChatGPT.”
What drives citations: four factors
- Third-party mentions weigh about 3 times more than links. According to an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, brand mentions on third-party sites correlate with showing up in Google AI Overviews about three times more strongly than backlinks (0.664 versus 0.218). What counts is that someone names you in context, not that they link to you.
- About 85% of visibility is built off your own site. According to AirOps, that means media, directories (ZnanyLekarz, Booksy, Panorama Firm, industry portals), Google reviews, forums, YouTube. Your own company site accounts for the remaining low double digits at most.
- Bot access is the fastest fix. According to Otterly.ai, about 73% of sites have technical barriers for AI bots: robots.txt blocks, CDN or WAF rules, and content rendered only in JavaScript, often from a plugin’s default setting. If you’re blocking access, the assistant can’t read you.
- Freshness and structure matter more than length. A direct answer at the top of the page, a pricing table, definitions, sourced numbers, and a visible last-updated date do more than a 3,000-word guide.
On top of that, there are technical conditions for indexing in ChatGPT search: the site accessible to OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot, clean HTML without key content rendered only in JavaScript, presence in the Bing index, current pages with dates. Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow help Bing discover pages faster, though OpenAI doesn’t confirm that this directly speeds up indexing inside ChatGPT itself.
What not to do
- Don’t buy Schema.org and FAQ markup as “AI optimization.” According to an Ahrefs study from May 2026 covering 1,885 pages with added JSON-LD markup, the effect on citations was statistically insignificant: Google AI Overviews dropped 4.6%, AI Mode rose 2.4%, ChatGPT rose 2.2%. If you already have markup for Google, keep it. If someone is selling it to you as GEO, they’re selling hygiene at the price of strategy.
- Don’t treat llms.txt as your main tool. The file doesn’t hurt, but it isn’t what moves the outcome: treat it as optional technical hygiene, not a GEO lever.
- Don’t astroturf Reddit. According to Peec AI, Reddit is the most cited domain in AI answers, and that’s exactly why it’s watched closely: Reddit itself has reported removing an average of 100,000 automated accounts a day as part of its bot crackdown. An honest answer signed with the owner’s or specialist’s name is fine; anything else isn’t worth the ban risk.
- Don’t buy reviews. Same mechanism, same consequences on review platforms.
- Don’t believe a promise of a fixed position. More on that below.
Checklist for a Polish business
| # | Item | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | robots.txt allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot | developer |
| 2 | Site in the Bing index, Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow enabled | developer |
| 3 | Key content (prices, scope, contact) in HTML, not only in JS | developer |
| 4 | Every service or category has its own page: answer at the top, pricing table, last-updated date | marketing |
| 5 | Google profile with current details, new reviews every month, all of them answered | front desk / owner |
| 6 | Profiles in your industry’s directories complete, with prices and the same name, address, and phone | marketing |
| 7 | At least one mention per quarter in local or industry media (expert comment, case study, ranking) | PR / agency |
| 8 | A video channel with at least five short answers to real customer questions | owner / agency |
| 9 | 20 to 30 test questions in Polish, checked every month in ChatGPT and Copilot | marketing |
| 10 | A “how did you hear about us” question with an “AI assistant” option on every order or booking | sales / front desk |
Ten items, zero software to buy. At the start, items 1, 4, and 10 are usually the ones missing.
How to measure it: share of answers, not rank
In SEO, you have a rank. In AI, you have Share of Voice: on how many of your 20 to 30 questions the assistant names your business, in what position, and with what reasoning. It’s the only metric you can honestly write into a contract.
Tools:
| Tool | Price | For |
|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet | $0 | first quarter: manual question checks once a month |
| Otterly | from $29/mo | automated question monitoring across several assistants |
| Peec | €89 to €199/mo | share of voice and citation sources |
| Profound | from $99/mo | monitoring for larger teams |
The second metric is assisted conversions: the assistant often names you without a link, so direct and branded traffic rises instead of “visits from chatgpt.com.” That’s why item 10 on the checklist matters so much. The case for measuring conversion rather than traffic: Opollo, across a sample of 312 B2B tech companies, shows 14.2% conversion from AI traffic versus 2.8% from organic, Semrush reports a 4.4x better result, and Shopify reports nearly 50% higher conversion on product pages from AI-referred visits. AI traffic runs warmer because the user arrives after a conversation.
Why no one promises you a position
Only about 30% of brands, according to an AirOps report, hold their spot across two consecutive answers to the same question. The model assembles the answer fresh each time, from a different set of sources, sometimes with a different emphasis. That’s not a malfunction, it’s how the system is built. So:
- In the contract, you write down Share of Voice across a fixed set of questions, measured monthly, plus assisted conversions. Not rank, not traffic.
- Any offer of a “certain spot in ChatGPT” is either a misunderstanding or an attempt to sell you something the seller doesn’t control.
- The goal is statistical: raise mention frequency from, say, 3 questions out of 20 to 8 out of 20 over a quarter, not “be first.”
90-day plan
| Period | Actions | Metric |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1 to 14 | Audit: 20 to 30 test questions, check robots.txt, Bing index, HTML, profiles, reviews. Baseline share of voice. | starting point in numbers |
| Days 15 to 30 | Technical fixes (checklist items 1 to 3), rebuild the 3 to 5 most important service pages with prices and dates, complete directory profiles | pages and profiles ready |
| Days 31 to 60 | Weekly reviews, first mention in local or industry media, first 5 short videos, turn on Microsoft AI Max for Bing and Copilot campaigns | mentions, videos, list of real queries |
| Days 61 to 90 | Second share-of-voice measurement, decision on a ChatGPT Ads test (30 days, from about 3,000 zł in media spend), plan for the next quarter | change in SoV, assisted conversions |
A quarter is the minimum to see a change in the metric. Media mentions and reviews build up slowly, and assistants pick them up with a lag.
GEO and advertising: when to add ChatGPT Ads and AI Max
GEO builds up over months. If you need results faster, there are two paid options, but in a specific order.
Start with Microsoft AI Max. It’s an optional set of controls in an existing Microsoft Ads account, rolled out globally starting August 2026 according to Microsoft Advertising. Its biggest value for GEO: it lets ads appear on more complex, conversational queries in Bing and Copilot, which feeds insight back into the question list in checklist item 9.
Then test ChatGPT Ads. According to OpenAI’s help center, as of September 25, 2026, Poland is on the list of 63 countries available to self-serve advertisers; Ukraine is not. The minimum is $25 a day, about 100 zł, with a starting bid recommended by OpenAI around $3 to $5. You verify your own company or sole proprietorship, country and currency lock in permanently, and you invite the agency as a user; these are platform rules, not legal or tax advice, so it’s worth checking the entity registration details with an accountant. New self-serve accounts can initially advertise only in their home country: other supported countries unlock automatically after identity verification and reaching a required spend threshold in the home country, and the amount isn’t published publicly. CTR can run low: one advertiser, according to Campaign, saw 0.91% against 6.4% on Google Search in the same sector, though that’s one client’s result, not a platform average, and the click tends to run warmer. The first version of Instant Checkout was pulled back in March 2026, and OpenAI moved purchase completion back to merchant sites, so the flow now is “discover in chat, buy on the site.” The ad sends a warm user to your listing, where your reviews and profiles still decide the outcome, which is why the checklist comes first. How we combine both channels is covered on the AI advertising service page. Costs in złoty and a 30-day test plan are in our article on ChatGPT Ads in Poland.
What not to plan for: separate placements in Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. According to Google Ads Help, ads from existing Search, Shopping, and Performance Max campaigns become visible there automatically, with no way to opt out or target that placement directly. Don’t plan for advertising on Perplexity either: according to the Financial Times, the company ended its ad program in February 2026.
6 mistakes that keep businesses out of ChatGPT answers
- Blocked AI bots in robots.txt that no one at the company knows about.
- Budget spent on schema and llms.txt instead of on reviews, mentions, and pages with prices.
- Hidden prices (“custom quote”). The assistant recommends the competitor with a pricing table.
- Bought reviews and Reddit seeding. You risk a ban, and the platform actively purges fake accounts.
- Measuring only chatgpt.com sessions. Most of the value carries no referrer.
- A contract for a fixed rank. No one controls that, so the contract either won’t be honored or will get “proven” with one lucky screenshot.
What MOVE offers
MOVE Agency has run SEO, content, and production for clinics, hospitality, ecommerce, and B2B businesses for years, and since September 2026 has had a team in Warsaw. We treat GEO as an addition to SEO and media, not as separate magic: an audit built on your own questions, technical fixes, service pages with prices, media mentions, on-site video production, and monthly share-of-voice measurement. On top of that, we set up Microsoft AI Max and ChatGPT Ads once the checklist is closed out. Pricing for Poland: an AI visibility audit from 6,000 zł, campaign management from 15% of budget. We don’t promise anyone a rank, because no one controls it. What we write into the contract is share of voice and assisted conversions.
The first step is an audit: where your business stands on the ten checklist items and on the 20 to 30 questions your customers actually ask. The scope is on the AI advertising service page, and you can order an AI visibility audit through the contact form. If you already have a proposal from another agency and want to know which parts of it actually make sense, get in touch and our Warsaw team will reply in Polish.