How can an interior design studio get recommended by ChatGPT?

Let ChatGPT read your site, say plainly who you are, where you work and what you take on, write project pages for the questions clients ask, and keep the same description on Houzz, Google and every directory. No one can guarantee a place in its answers. You can do most of this yourself, and a web designer, a publicist or a GEO specialist can each take one part.

What does "recommended by ChatGPT" mean?

When a client asks ChatGPT for an interior designer with its search on, it reads a few pages on the web and writes a short list. In our test of 60 answers from ChatGPT and Perplexity, every answer named between 3 and 10 studios, about 5 on average. Asked again, ChatGPT changed about half its names. We wrote that up in How ChatGPT decides which interior designer to name.

So it is not a ranking you hold. It is a chance you raise, one answer at a time. And most studios start at zero: when we checked 224 high-end studios, 171 came up in none of 6 answers (Why your interior design studio doesn't come up in ChatGPT).

1. Let it read your site

OpenAI says plainly that sites which block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI's crawler page¹). Open yourstudio.com/robots.txt and look for OAI-SearchBot, or for "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *". A rule against GPTBot is a different thing: that one is about training, not about search answers. After a change, OpenAI says it takes about 24 hours.

This is rarely the problem. Only 2 of the 215 studio sites we read blocked AI search bots. So look once, then move on.

What matters more is that your words are text. Google's own advice for its AI features includes "making sure that important content is available in textual form" (Google Search Central²). A studio name set inside a picture, or a description that lives only on Instagram, gives an assistant nothing to read. In the answers we collected, Instagram did not appear once in 6,910 links.

2. Say who you are, where you work and what you take on

One plain sentence near the top of your home page and your about page: an interior design studio in a named city that designs whole homes for private clients in a named region, or whatever is true for you. We wrote how to write that sentence.

Many studio sites say very little. The typical home page in our check had 189 words in its HTML, and 78 of 215 had fewer than 100. Outside the five biggest cities, studios with 500 words or more on the home page came up in 16 of 33 cases, against 10 of 48 under 100 words. A studio with more to say may also have more years and press behind it, so this is not proof that words alone do it. But an assistant can only repeat what is written down.

3. Write project pages for the questions clients ask

Clients who know what they have ask specific questions. When we asked ChatGPT for a high-end designer in London for a full renovation of a Georgian townhouse, 4 of the 5 pages it cited across two runs were studios' own pages about one townhouse or historic London house.

So name the place, the building, its age and what was done on every project page. A page titled, say, "A Georgian townhouse in Islington, fully renovated" can match a question that a home page never will. Our guide to the project page gives the order.

4. Be the same everywhere else

Assistants read more than your site. Perplexity looked at a Houzz page among its first 8 sources in 450 of 605 answers, and cited one in at least 196. Directories, design lists and magazines came up again and again.

Use the same name, city and description on Houzz, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. Press counts too: we looked at how to show press on your site.

5. Skip the shortcuts

Google says there are no special optimizations needed to appear in its AI features, and that "you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." Our own numbers agree. Studios with an llms.txt file came up 21 percent of the time, and studios without one 24 percent. With structured data on the home page it was 24 percent, and without it 22 percent.

Neither file hurts. Neither is the reason a studio is named.

6. Check what it says, more than once

Ask the question a client of yours would ask: your area and your kind of project, not only "best interior designer". Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity, a few times each, on different days. Write down who is named and which pages are cited. If the cited pages are lists you aren't on, that tells you where to work. If one is your own site, see which page it is.

You can do this yourself, or run our free AI check.

Who can help?

You. Most of this is writing and checking. Nobody knows your projects better.

Your web designer. Can check robots.txt, put your words in text rather than pictures, build project pages that carry place and building, keep the site fast on a phone and make sure any structured data matches what the page says.

A publicist. Press and the design lists are among the pages assistants read. That work is theirs.

A GEO specialist. Works to get your studio named: runs the questions on a schedule, reads which pages are cited, and fixes the site and the profiles to match. Prices run from under $20 a month for a tool you use yourself to $1,500 a month and up at US agencies that publish their prices, as we found in What does GEO cost for an interior designer?

Whoever you choose, ask which questions they will check, in which assistants and how often, and whether you will see the answers themselves. Be careful with anyone who promises that ChatGPT will name you, or who sells a new file as the fix.

Where does fioel stand?

We are a studio in Amsterdam that designs websites for interior designers and interior architects, worldwide, and works to get them found on Google and named in AI answers. We are one of the people who can help with this, so read it knowing that. More on how we work in GEO for interior designers. To see what ChatGPT says about your studio now, run the free AI check, or book 15 minutes.