How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT: 6 Honest Steps (UK)

Quick answer

Nobody can guarantee ChatGPT will recommend your business. What you can do is make it easy for AI tools to find and trust you: let their search crawlers read your site, state your services, prices and areas plainly, keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere, and earn genuine reviews on Google and the directories in your trade.

AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and Copilot are increasingly where people ask “who should I use for this?”. There is no trick for getting named in the answer, and anyone selling a guaranteed placement is selling something they do not control. This guide covers the honest work that raises your chances, in the order we would do it.

How AI assistants decide which businesses to mention

When someone asks an assistant for a recommendation, it usually does one of two things. It answers from what it learned in training, which is out of date for most small businesses, or it searches the web live and summarises what it finds. For local and current questions, the live search route is what matters, and that is good news: it rewards the same things that work in ordinary search.

Google says this plainly. Its guidance on AI features and your website states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. In other words, the foundations of SEO are the foundations of AI visibility.

What the assistant is looking for, in practice:

• Clear facts it can quote: what you do, where, for whom and at what price.
• Agreement between sources: your website, Google Business Profile and directories saying the same thing.
• Independent signals: reviews, directory listings, local press and trade body memberships.

Step 1: make sure AI crawlers can read your site

Each AI company uses its own crawler, and your robots.txt file can block them, sometimes by accident. OpenAI’s documentation on its crawlers explains that OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and that sites which opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. It also explains that this is separate from GPTBot, which relates to training, so you can allow one and block the other.

Check three things:

1. Visit yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt and look for any “Disallow” lines naming OAI-SearchBot or blocking all bots.
2. Ask whoever manages your hosting whether a firewall or security plugin blocks unfamiliar crawlers.
3. Confirm Google can index your pages; our guide to a website not showing on Google walks through that test.

Step 2: write your facts where a machine can find them

AI tools quote sentences. If your website hides the basics behind vague slogans, there is nothing to quote. Every service page should answer, in plain words near the top:

• what the service is and who it is for;
• which towns or postcodes you cover;
• a price, a starting price or what the price depends on;
• how long it takes and what the customer gets.

Short question-and-answer sections help, because they match how people phrase questions to an assistant. “Do you cover Harrogate?” with a one-line answer is more useful than a paragraph about passion and quality.

Step 3: make your details identical everywhere

Assistants cross-check. If your website says one phone number, Google another and an old directory a third, the safest thing for a machine to do is mention someone else. Google’s own guidelines for Business Profiles ask you to represent the business as it is consistently known in the real world, across signage, stationery and the website.

Step 4: strengthen your Google Business Profile

For “near me” and local questions, assistants lean heavily on map and business listing data. A complete Business Profile with the right primary category, services listed, recent photos and steady reviews is one of the strongest signals a small business can control. Our guide to Google Business Profile optimisation covers each field, and if you would rather have it done, Google Business Profile Setup & Optimisation is £199 and covers categories, keywords, photos, review strategy and tracking.

Step 5: earn reviews and mentions the honest way

Reviews are one of the few independent signals an assistant can read about a small business. Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment the job is finished, with a direct link. Reply to every review, good and bad, calmly and specifically.

Beyond reviews, look for genuine mentions:

• trade body and accreditation listings with your website link;
• local business groups, chambers of commerce and supplier “find an installer” pages;
• local news coverage of real events, such as a new premises or a community project.

Do not buy reviews or write them yourself. Fake reviews break platform rules and consumer law, and they can get a profile suspended, which removes you from the very source assistants check.

Step 6: publish answers to the questions customers ask

Think about the questions people type into ChatGPT before they hire someone like you: “how much does a new consumer unit cost in Leeds”, “do I need planning permission for a porch”, “is it worth servicing a boiler every year”. A short, accurate page answering each one, written by someone who does the work, is exactly the kind of source assistants summarise and link to. Keep it factual, date your prices, and update them when they change.

A worked example: a roofer in Harrogate

Take a hypothetical two-person roofing firm. Asked “who should I use for a flat roof repair in Harrogate?”, an assistant names three competitors. A month of the steps above might look like this:

1. Week one. The robots.txt file, set up years ago by a web developer, blocks every bot except Google’s. It is changed to allow search crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot.
2. Week two. The flat roofing page gains a plain opening: flat roof repairs and replacements in Harrogate, Knaresborough and Ripon, typical repair prices, how long a replacement takes, and the guarantee offered.
3. Week three. The firm finds two old directory listings with a former mobile number and a previous address, and corrects them so every source agrees with the website and Business Profile.
4. Week four. The firm starts asking every finished customer for a Google review by text, with a direct link, and replies to each one.

None of this guarantees a mention. What it does is remove the reasons an assistant had for leaving the firm out: it could not read the site, could not find the facts, and found conflicting details. The same changes usually lift ordinary search and map visibility too, which is where most enquiries still come from.

What does not work (and what to avoid)

How to check whether it is working

There is no AI equivalent of a ranking report yet, so check by hand once a month. Ask ChatGPT, Copilot and Google the same three or four questions a customer would ask, with your town included, and note whether you appear, which sources are cited, and what they say about you. If a competitor is cited from a directory you are not on, that is your next listing. Alongside this, watch Google Search Console for impressions on question-style searches, which tells you whether your answer pages are being seen at all. Our free SEO audit is a quick way to spot technical problems that block both.

Where we can help

Most of the work above is free and within your control. If you would rather hand it over, our SEO service is £249 a month and covers rankings, content, technical health, link building and reports, which are the same foundations AI tools rely on. We do not promise placements in AI answers, because nobody honestly can. Prices for everything we do are on our pricing page.