How ChatGPT decides which businesses to recommend in Luxembourg

Short answer: ChatGPT recommends a business in one of two ways. It either answers from what it learned in training, or it searches the web, often several times for one question, and builds its answer from the pages it finds. Nobody outside OpenAI knows the exact rules, but both paths depend on the same thing: what the web says about your business, and whether it says it clearly and in the same way everywhere.

Does ChatGPT answer from memory or search the web?

Both, depending on the question. It helps to think of two separate sources:

	Training data	Live search
What it is	Text the model learned from before it was released	Web pages ChatGPT looks up while it writes the answer
How up to date	Stops at a fixed date. OpenAI lists a "knowledge cutoff" for each model (OpenAI)	Current. OpenAI describes web search as the way its models get up-to-date information (OpenAI)
Which crawler feeds it	GPTBot, which collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models (OpenAI)	OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI uses to show websites in ChatGPT search (OpenAI)
Shows links?	No	Yes, the sources it used

For a question like "Which accountant in Luxembourg City handles VAT for small companies?", the answer needs current, local facts, so a search is likely. If ChatGPT answers without links, it is working from training data, and what it says about you reflects what was online before its cutoff date. A change you made last month will not be in there.

Whether your site can appear in live answers is partly in your hands. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI). OpenAI's help page adds that ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors and that "Placement is not guaranteed" (OpenAI Help Center). Blocking GPTBot only means your content should not be used for training. Our guides on letting ChatGPT read your website and checking whether Cloudflare or your firewall blocks AI bots show how to check both.

How does ChatGPT search for businesses? One question, several searches

ChatGPT does not simply paste your question into a search engine. OpenAI says that "ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers" and that when it does, it "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" that it sends to those providers. After reviewing the first results, it may send additional, more specific queries. OpenAI's own example: "What are some good restaurants near me?", asked from San Francisco, becomes "top restaurants San Francisco" (OpenAI Help Center). ChatGPT works out a general location from your IP address and may share that general location, not the IP address itself, with those providers; if memory is turned on, saved memories may also be used when it rewrites a search (OpenAI Help Center). OpenAI's developer documentation describes the same pattern for its reasoning models: the model can search, read the results and decide whether to keep searching (OpenAI).

Google uses a name for this: query fan-out. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may issue multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources (Google Search Central), and that AI Mode breaks your question down into subtopics and searches for them at the same time (Google).

Here is an illustration. It is our own example, not a recording of real searches. A customer asks: "Which fiduciary in Luxembourg City can do VAT returns for my small company, in French?" The searches behind the answer might look like this:

• fiduciaire Luxembourg ville PME
• déclaration TVA fiduciaire Luxembourg
• best accountant small business Luxembourg reviews
• Fiduciaire Veldrin services prix

Each search returns different pages: a directory, a "best of" list, a review site, the firm's own service page. The answer is put together from those pages. So a business can be missed not because it is bad, but because none of the pages found by these smaller searches mention it.

Why does consistency across sources matter?

Google is explicit about two things. It asks site owners to make sure their structured data matches the visible text on the page, and to keep their Business Profile information up to date (Google Search Central). For local results, Google says prominence is based partly on how many websites link to a business and how many reviews it has (Google Business Profile Help).

Our reasoning, not a published rule: neither OpenAI nor Google says that matching facts across websites earns a recommendation. But if one question leads to several searches, an assistant may read your opening hours on your website, on Google Maps and on editus.lu in the same answer. When those agree, there is one fact to repeat. When they disagree, it has to pick one, may pick the wrong one, or may pick a competitor whose details are simpler to state.

Example: Café Ribeiro moved from Bonnevoie to the Gare district. The new address is on its website, but its old listing still shows Bonnevoie and a food blog from two years ago does too. Asked for "a Portuguese café near Luxembourg station", an assistant reading those pages sees two addresses for one café. Fixing the old listing removes that doubt.

What can a Luxembourg business influence?

You cannot control what ChatGPT says. You can control most of what it reads. In rough order:

What to do	Why	Guide
Let AI search crawlers in	Blocked sites are left out of ChatGPT search answers	Let ChatGPT read your website, Check Cloudflare and your firewall
Get found by Google and Bing	Google only shows pages that are indexed and eligible for a snippet as links in its AI features	Get found by Google and Bing
Correct wrong facts	Old addresses, hours and prices get repeated	Correct the wrong facts ChatGPT tells about you
Describe your business in structured data	States your name, address and services in a format machines read, matching your visible text	Tell machines who you are
Keep your Google Business Profile current	Google asks for this directly for its AI features	Google Business Profile for Luxembourg businesses
Be listed where Luxembourg searches land	A directory page is one of the places a short local search can lead	Get listed where ChatGPT looks in Luxembourg
Earn a place on lists and sites that get cited	"Best of" articles and association pages are read alongside your own site	Get onto the sites ChatGPT cites

Google says the content it needs should be available as text and that crawling should be allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting setup (Google Search Central). None of these steps guarantees a recommendation. They make sure that when an assistant looks, it finds you, and finds the right facts.

What ChatGPT says about you today

The quickest way to see where you stand is to ask the questions your customers ask. Start with Guide 01: Check what ChatGPT says about your business, or get a free report: we ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews those questions from Luxembourg, in English, French and German, and show you who they name and what they say about you.

FAQ

Can I make ChatGPT recommend my business?

No one can promise that, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What you can do is make your information easy to find, easy to read and the same everywhere, so that when ChatGPT looks, it finds correct facts about you.

Does ChatGPT use the information on my website?

It can, if its search crawler is allowed in. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI). Separately, content collected by GPTBot may be used to train OpenAI's models.

How quickly does ChatGPT notice a change?

For robots.txt, OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours for its systems to adjust after you update the file (OpenAI). For other changes OpenAI publishes no timing: what ChatGPT learned in training stays as it was until a newer model comes out, while live searches can pick up a change once the page is found again.

Do I need an llms.txt file or special code for AI?

Not for Google. Google says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode (Google Search Central).

Why does ChatGPT give different answers to the same question?

Partly because the searches behind the answer change. OpenAI says that when ChatGPT search partners with other search providers, it typically rewrites your question into one or more targeted queries, may send more specific ones after reading the first results, and may share your general location (not your IP address) with those providers (OpenAI Help Center). The wording, the language and where you ask from can all change which pages it reads.

Sources

Checked 24 October 2026. AI assistants change often; we re-check these sources when we update this page.