Can you pay to be recommended by ChatGPT? AI visibility guarantees and GEO packages

Only in a narrow way. You can pay Google, OpenAI or Microsoft for a labelled ad beside some AI answers, and even then nobody promises it will show. What you can't buy, from anyone, is a place inside the answer itself. So when an agency guarantees that ChatGPT will recommend you, it's promising something no AI company says can be done. Some of the work in these packages is genuinely useful. The guarantee is the part to walk away from.

This is part of our series marketing myths, checked, in which each claim is tested against what the company running the system actually publishes. Where it touches on the law, it isn't legal advice.

Our interest

We sell AI search visibility work ourselves, so we have an interest in this. What we sell is the ordinary work described below: finding what assistants get wrong about a business, or can't find at all, fixing it, and checking again afterwards. We don't guarantee that any assistant will name you, and our AI search visibility page says so. If you've been offered a package and would like a second opinion, ask us.

What's being sold

The offers come in a few shapes. There's the monthly retainer to get your business "mentioned" or "ranked" in ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI answers. There's the report showing your "AI ranking" against competitors, updated monthly. There's the package called GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AEO (answer engine optimisation), sold as a discipline separate from SEO. And there's often a guarantee: be recommended within a set time, or reach a set position, or get your money back.

We're describing what's sold, not who sells it. The question is whether the promise can be kept, and that depends on what the companies behind the assistants say.

How the assistants choose what to name

Google. Its guide to generative AI features says its AI answers are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems": it pulls pages from its index and runs several related searches behind the scenes to build an answer. To be in the running at all, a page has to be on Google's list and allowed to show a short preview of its text. Google also says a complete Business Profile can help a business appear in its AI answers.

OpenAI. Its publisher FAQ says "Any public website can appear in ChatGPT search", as long as it doesn't block OpenAI's search software. OpenAI also says ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers", and that when it does, it "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" to send to those providers. So what ChatGPT can name may depend on what an ordinary search returns.

Microsoft. Bing's guidelines say Bing and Copilot "rely on the same core crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation as traditional search". Jordi Ribas, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Search and AI, has also written on the Bing blog that its grounding "powers nearly every major AI assistant in the market", which is Microsoft's own claim about its own reach.

Anthropic and Perplexity. Both publish which software they use for search: Anthropic names Claude-SearchBot and Perplexity names PerplexityBot. Neither publishes how its assistant decides which businesses to name, so for those two we simply don't know.

None of the five describes a way for an outsider to change which business an answer names.

Can you pay to be in the answer?

This is where the claim is partly true. Three of the companies sell ads that appear alongside AI answers. All three sell them directly, mark them as ads, and say or show that the ad is separate from the answer.

• Google. Ads can appear above or below AI Overviews everywhere AI Overviews are available. Ads inside them are available only in a listed set of countries, and on 26 September 2026 the UK wasn't one of them. Even where they are available, Google's help for advertisers says they "can't directly target ad placements in the AI Overviews", because ads win their place through the ordinary auction.
• OpenAI. Its ads appear below the end of a response, "visually separated from ChatGPT's response" and marked as sponsored. OpenAI's page on ads in ChatGPT is unambiguous: "Ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT's responses." It adds that an ad doesn't mean OpenAI "endorses or recommends the advertiser". The UK is on OpenAI's list of countries where advertisers can buy through its Ads Manager.
• Microsoft. Ads in Copilot are built automatically from existing Microsoft Advertising campaigns, and Microsoft's advertising help says "there's no guarantee that their ads will be displayed in Copilot".

When Perplexity began testing ads in the US in November 2024, it said "the content of the answers you receive on Perplexity will not be influenced by advertisers", with the ads shown as sponsored follow-up questions and media beside the answer. We couldn't find a current statement on whether it still runs them.

Anthropic says Claude "will remain ad-free", and that Claude's responses will not "be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements".

OpenAI's shopping results are a related case, and a telling one. It says its product results "are not ads, nor influenced by any OpenAI partnerships". It built a checkout inside the chat, where merchants paid a fee on completed purchases, and said even then that the fee "doesn't influence ChatGPT's product results". It has since changed course. OpenAI now tells merchants it is "moving away from a standalone Instant Checkout experience in ChatGPT", that "purchases are completed on merchant-owned websites or apps", and that there are "no fees for purchases made on your site or app". So the one commercial relationship OpenAI had with the shops it names has gone, and the answer still isn't for sale.

So the paid routes that exist are the platforms' own ads, bought from the platforms and shown as ads. None of them is a place inside the answer, and none comes with a guarantee. If someone is selling you "guaranteed placement" and it turns out to be an ad budget, you can buy those ads yourself, and it helps to know what Google Ads cost before you start.

What Google says about "GEO"

Google's position is that GEO isn't a separate discipline at all. Its guide to AI search says optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, "and thus still SEO". The same guide lists the "hacks" you can ignore, among them "LLMS.txt files and other 'special' markup", breaking content into small chunks, and "Seeking inauthentic 'mentions'", which it says "isn't as helpful as it might seem". And it warns: "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems."

Its guidance on outside SEO advice goes further. It names "AEO" and "GEO" tools directly, says Google "doesn't evaluate third-party services", and says of those tools: "They can't guarantee performance. Any predictions are their own and like predictions generally, may not happen."

Microsoft sees it differently, up to a point. Its own blog uses the term GEO, describing it as "the practice of understanding how content participates in AI-driven experiences", and we set out how far the two companies disagree when we checked whether SEO is dead. But Microsoft's webmaster guidelines still say the same SEO foundations support Copilot, so the name differs while the work described is the same.

Does a guarantee fit what the companies publish?

No. Put the published statements side by side:

• Google's advice on hiring an SEO: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." It says to beware anyone guaranteeing rankings or claiming "a 'special relationship' with Google", and if an SEO audit comes with a guarantee of first place, to "find someone else".
• Google's guidance on outside tools: they "can't guarantee performance".
• OpenAI's page on ads: advertisers, who pay OpenAI directly, "have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT's responses".
• Microsoft's help on Copilot ads: even for paid ads, "there's no guarantee" they will show in Copilot.
• Google's help for advertisers: advertisers "can't directly target ad placements in the AI Overviews".

If the platform's own paying advertisers can't secure a place, and the platform says no outside tool can see its systems, then nobody has published a way for a third party to deliver the result. A "guarantee" of this kind can only be a promise to refund you if it doesn't happen. That can be perfectly honest, as long as it's described as exactly that. What it can't be is a promise about how the assistant will behave.

Answers vary from day to day, too. Bing's own AI reporting describes its "citation share" measure as "an observational metric" and "not a ranking system", and says citation patterns shift with what people ask, with the models themselves and with how fresh content is, among other things. So a monthly "AI ranking" that treats one answer as a fixed position is measuring something the platform itself says moves.

Where it's partly true: the ordinary work

Much of what these packages do is real work that the companies themselves say helps, and it's the same work whatever anyone calls it.

• Letting the search software in. OpenAI's page on its crawlers says a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". Anthropic's equivalent page says blocking Claude-SearchBot "may reduce your site's visibility", and Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in its crawler documentation.
• Being on Google's list and allowed to show a preview, which Google's guide says is all its generative AI features require. If your pages aren't there, start with why a website isn't showing up on Google, and if you're paying someone to check, judge their work against what an SEO audit should include.
• Writing so a page stands on its own. Bing's guidelines ask for facts stated plainly, key information near the top, and people, organisations and places named the same way every time.
• Getting your business on Bing, including telling it through IndexNow when pages change, which Bing's guidelines ask for by name.
• A complete Business Profile, which Google says can help your products and services appear in its AI answers.
• Measuring what the platforms themselves report. Search Console's generative AI performance report shows how often you appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Bing's AI Performance report shows where Copilot cites you.

What the companies tell you not to do matters just as much. Bing's guidelines list "Prompt Injection and AI Manipulation" and "artificial social promotion schemes that simulate popularity" as abuse that can cost you visibility or get you removed. Google treats pages churned out at scale to manipulate rankings or AI answers as scaled content abuse. So a package built on invented mentions, mass-produced pages, or text written at AI systems rather than at people risks exactly the opposite of what it promises. For the honest version of the work, channel by channel, start with what AI actually changes about marketing your business.

What the law says about an empty guarantee

It depends on who's buying.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans misleading actions, including an "overall presentation which is likely to deceive the average consumer". But its unfair commercial practices rules, in Part 4, Chapter 1, protect consumers, meaning "an individual acting for purposes that are wholly or mainly outside the individual's business". A business buying marketing services usually isn't a consumer. The CMA makes the same point in its guidance on unfair commercial practices, CMA207, dated 18 November 2025. Among its examples of practices those rules don't cover, it says a trader selling only to businesses "does not need to consider compliance" with them and "should however consider the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008".

Those regulations prohibit advertising that deceives the traders it reaches, and regulation 3 lists "results to be expected from use of the product" among the things it can mislead about.

The advertising code has rules of its own. The CAP Code requires marketers to "hold documentary evidence to prove claims that consumers are likely to regard as objective" before an advert goes out, says an advert "must not mislead by omitting significant limitations to an advertised guarantee", and requires marketers to "promptly refund consumers who make valid claims under an advertised money-back guarantee". Those are rules 3.7, 3.56 and 3.57 of the code's Edition 12.

We found no ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority, and no enforcement case, on a guarantee of AI visibility or search ranking specifically, so we can't say how one would be judged. What the rules do make clear is the question to ask: what evidence does the seller hold for the result they promise?

Questions to ask before you sign

Alongside our general questions to ask a marketing agency, these are the ones specific to AI visibility.

• Which platform's own documentation supports each thing you will do?
• Is the guarantee a refund, and what exactly triggers it?
• Which prompts, which assistants, how often, and from where will you measure?
• Are you buying ads for me, or doing organic work? If ads, why not buy them myself?
• Will you create reviews, listings, articles or mentions in my name anywhere?
• Will I own every account and every piece of content you create?

What we couldn't confirm

Three things remain open. Anthropic and Perplexity publish which crawlers they use, but not how their assistants choose which businesses to name. We couldn't confirm whether Perplexity still runs the ads it began testing in November 2024, or whether Google shows ads in AI Mode in the UK. And we found no published UK ruling or enforcement case on an AI visibility guarantee, so how the rules above would apply to a specific promise is untested.

None of that changes the advice. Pay for the ordinary work if it's done well, treat any guarantee as the refund offer it really is, and walk away from anyone who says they can buy you a place in the answer.