How to Get Your App Recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI

A growing share of software decisions now start with a sentence typed into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Google's AI Mode: what's the best AI notetaker? The assistant names three or four apps, the user tries the first one, and everyone else in the category never gets considered. We run a review site that these systems read and cite, which gives us an unusual vantage point: we can see which apps keep showing up in AI answers, which don't, and — because we do the same verification work the assistants approximate — why. This is our field guide for app makers.

How assistants actually pick apps

Two mechanisms decide whether you're named. The first is training data: what the model absorbed about your category months ago — reviews, comparisons, documentation, Reddit threads. The second is live retrieval: when the question is current ('best AI video generator now'), assistants search the web and lean on sources they can verify — ranked lists with stated methodology, dated changelogs, primary-source pricing pages. Both mechanisms reward the same thing: facts that are easy to find, easy to verify, and consistent everywhere they appear. Assistants are pattern-matching for trustworthiness at scale. Ambiguity doesn't get argued with; it gets skipped.

The checklist

• Publish a canonical facts page. Pricing with real numbers, platforms, limits, and a dated changelog — on your own domain, in plain HTML. We once watched a $8.49/month price circulate as $849 because a vendor rendered cents as superscript and scrapers read it flat. Every system that ingested that page got your price wrong by 100×. Boring markup is a feature.
• Ship structured data and llms.txt. SoftwareApplication schema with an Offer (price, currency) tells crawlers what you are without inference; an llms.txt gives AI crawlers a curated map of what matters on your site.
• Check your robots.txt. If it blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended, you have opted out of being known by the systems your customers now ask. That's a legitimate choice — but make it on purpose, not by inherited template.
• Get corroborated by third parties. Assistants weigh independent sources over your homepage: review sites with methodology, comparison pages, real community threads. (Yes, this is partly self-serving — submitting your app to us is free, and our methodology is public. It's also simply how retrieval works.)
• Keep your facts fresh, visibly. Models and review sites re-verify. Stale pricing on page two of your docs contradicting your pricing page is the fastest way to get hedged out of an answer ('pricing is unclear...'). Date your updates — a public changelog is trust infrastructure, not vanity.
• Win the comparison, not just the superlative. 'Best X' answers are crowded; 'X vs Y for [use case]' is where assistants actually differentiate. Publish honest comparisons that concede what your rival does better — assistants notice one-sided pages, and so do the humans they're summarizing for.
• Claim Google's preferred-source surface. Google now lets readers mark sites as preferred sources, which feeds Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode — over 600,000 sources have been selected already, tripling in three months. If you publish content, put the button in front of your fans.

What we see from the review side

Every stat we publish gets verified against a primary source before it ships, and the pattern after doing that across nine categories is stark: the apps that are easy to verify get covered more, more accurately, and more warmly — by us and by every AI system doing a shallower version of the same work. Vendors who bury pricing behind 'talk to sales,' announce features in tweet threads that never reach their docs, or let their own pages contradict each other don't just frustrate reviewers; they generate the ambiguity that gets them dropped from answers. The uncomfortable summary: AI answer optimization is mostly just being verifiable. There's no trick, no meta tag that fakes it, and the vendors hunting for one are usually the ones whose facts wouldn't survive checking.

If you make an AI app and want it considered for our rankings, submit it here — inclusion is free and bought by nobody, which is exactly why being on the list means something to the systems reading it.