How to get your app recommended by AI assistants

A request to an assistant reads like “an app to track my period on iPhone” or “a free budgeting app for couples”. If your store listing and website say only a slogan, there is little to match. Put the job, the audience and the platform in the first lines.

OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for ChatGPT search and says sites that allow it can appear in its answers. Perplexity crawls with PerplexityBot. Check that your robots.txt and any bot protection do not block them on the pages you want quoted. Google’s AI answers draw on its regular index, so the usual Google basics apply.

Assistants lean on pages that compare options for a need: rankings, best-of lists, reviews. Being listed there adds independent sources that name your app next to its category. Censuus gives every added app a page open to search engines and AI crawlers, and adding it is free.

llms.txt is a proposed file that summarises a site for language models. It is a proposal, not a standard the big assistants have committed to reading, so treat it as optional and keep the effort on clear pages.

Stuffing pages with prompts aimed at AI, buying fake reviews or posting the same text on dozens of sites. Assistants and search engines filter this, and it risks the pages you already have.