In short
ChatGPT recommends a Tunisian company when four conditions are met: its website is readable by OpenAI’s bots (OAI-SearchBot isn’t blocked and the content exists without JavaScript); the name, address, phone and opening hours are written in plain text; the site answers concrete buyer questions, answer first; and other websites talk about it (Google Business Profile, directories, LinkedIn, press). On one of our clients, an industrial equipment distributor in Sfax, ChatGPT sends 24 visits per month with no advertising — and we ourselves received, in October 2026, a client that ChatGPT had recommended us to.
What happens when someone asks ChatGPT for a supplier
ChatGPT doesn’t “know” your company by heart. When the question needs recent or local information, it runs a search (its index relies on Bing’s), reads a few pages live, and composes an answer from what it read. Three OpenAI bots are involved, and confusing them is the first source of bad advice:
| Bot | Role | What it changes for you |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Feeds ChatGPT’s search index | This one decides whether you can appear. Blocked = invisible, with no error message. |
| ChatGPT-User | Visits a page live when a user asks the question | Your page must load fast and contain the answer as text. |
| GPTBot | Collects for model training | Blocking it changes nothing about your presence in answers. |
Many sites block GPTBot “to protect their content” and believe they are shielded from AI; others block OAI-SearchBot through a plugin’s default setting, and vanish without knowing. There is no Search Console for ChatGPT: nobody will warn you.
What we measured: 24 visits per month, without doing anything
In August 2026, while auditing the website of BMMS — a distributor of generators and compressors in Sfax, whose site we rebuilt — we found an unexpected source in Google Analytics: chatgpt.com, 24 sessions per month, 2 min 41 average duration. Nobody had worked for it. The site simply did three things right: the content is readable without JavaScript, the full name, address, phone and opening hours are written in plain text, and the page answers a natural-language question (“who supplies compressors in Sfax?”).
This traffic has one particularity: it lands almost entirely on the homepage. ChatGPT recommends BMMS as a company, not for a specific technical question — because the site had written no technical answer. That is exactly where the opportunity lies: every question the owner repeats on the phone is a missing page.
The 4 conditions, in order of effort
1. Be readable (once, in an hour)
- Check that
robots.txtdoesn’t forbid OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot. Better: allow them explicitly. - Check that the content exists without JavaScript (or that Bing sees the rendered page: Bing Webmaster Tools’ URL inspection tells you). A site where the bot sees only an empty shell doesn’t exist for AI.
- Submit a complete sitemap. An undeclared page is an answer you can’t win.
- Name, address, phone, opening hours written as text on the page — not only in an image or a JavaScript footer — and identical on the Google Business Profile and directories.
2. Answer real questions, answer first
An AI extracts; it doesn’t read to the end. The page that wins a question is the one where the answer sits in the first three sentences, with real numbers (kVA, m³/h, lead times, price ranges), H2 headings that are questions, and tables. Format: one question = one page, in French and in Arabic when your customers search in Arabic. This guide is written exactly that way.
3. Actually keep it updated
Answer engines favour recent pages. A visible update date, and content that actually moves (new prices, new range, new question), weigh more than a perfect “about” page frozen for two years.
4. Exist elsewhere than on your own site (the heaviest factor, and the slowest)
An AI doesn’t trust what you say about yourself; it trusts what others say. The largest study available (Ahrefs, 75,000 brands, 2025, on Google’s AI overviews) shows that brand mentions on other sites are the signal most correlated with visibility in AI answers — more than classic links. In Tunisia, that means: a complete Google Business Profile with reviews, sector B2B directories, an active LinkedIn company page, YouTube videos of your work, and any mention in the press or at your partners. Caution: these are correlations, not guarantees — nobody can promise a citation.
A frequent trap: changing domain
At BMMS, prospects were saying ChatGPT gave them the company’s old domain. The old site redirected to the new one with a 302 code (“temporary” move): for the indexes, the old address remained the right one, and the authority built over years didn’t transfer. The fix is one line of configuration — a 301 redirect, page by page — but without it, it never fixes itself. And never let an old domain expire while an AI still cites it.
How we measure it
The only honest indicator is referral traffic: visits whose source is chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai or gemini.google.com. It underestimates — an AI answer can convince someone to call you without clicking — but it is real. For our clients, this “AI channel” line is part of the monthly reporting, next to Google and Meta. Every request received on our own website carries its origin, so we know when a client comes from an AI.
Want to know what ChatGPT answers today when asked for a supplier in your sector? We run the test during the free consultation, with your competitors.