How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

Try this. Open ChatGPT and type the question a customer would ask: "Who's a good electrician in Bury St Edmunds?" or "Best dog groomer near Ipswich?" Swap in your trade and your town.

Are you in the answer? If you are, good. If you're not, or ChatGPT gets your details wrong, this guide is for you. We'll go through what it actually looks at, and what you can change this week. If you'd rather start with a quick health check, our free AI website check runs through 17 of the basics in under a minute.

First, the honest bit

Nobody can promise you a spot in ChatGPT's answers. Not us, not anyone. The answers aren't for sale, and OpenAI doesn't publish a checklist that guarantees a mention.

What you can do is make it easy for ChatGPT to find you, understand what you do, and trust that you're real. Businesses that do those three things well get named more often than businesses that don't. That's the whole game, and it's the same thing we look at in our full AI audit.

How ChatGPT finds businesses

When ChatGPT searches the web to answer a question, it uses its own crawler, called OAI-SearchBot, to read pages. OpenAI's own page about its crawlers says that sites which block OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers.

So step one is boring but important: make sure you're not blocking it. Plenty of websites do by accident, usually through a security plugin or a setting someone ticked years ago. You can see your own rules by typing your web address followed by /robots.txt into your browser. If you see OAI-SearchBot or GPTBot next to Disallow: /, that's a problem worth fixing. Our free check looks for this automatically, along with the other main AI crawlers.

While you're at it, add your website to Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft Copilot is built on Bing, and it takes about ten minutes.

Say clearly what you do and where

This is where most small business websites fall down. They're written for people who already know the business.

A home page that says "Quality workmanship since 1998" tells ChatGPT almost nothing. One that says "Electrician in Bury St Edmunds. Rewiring, fuse boxes, EV chargers and fault finding across west Suffolk" tells it exactly what you do and where.

A few things that help:

• Your trade and your town in plain words, near the top of the home page.
• A page for each main service, not one page that lists everything. "EV charger installation" deserves its own page if you want to be found for it.
• The areas you cover, written out. "We cover Bury St Edmunds, Thetford, Newmarket and the villages in between" is far more useful than a map image AI tools can't read.
• Your phone number and address as text, not only inside an image or a contact form.

If your website is so old that changes like these are a struggle, it may be cheaper to start again with one of our monthly website plans.

Add the labels AI tools look for

Structured data is a small block of code that labels your details so machines don't have to guess: this is the business name, this is the phone number, these are the opening hours. The common format is called schema.org LocalBusiness, and it has types for most trades: Plumber, Electrician, HairSalon, Dentist and so on.

You don't need to write it by hand. Most website builders and WordPress SEO plugins have a section for it. Fill in every field you can and keep it matching what's on your page. If the two disagree, AI tools have a reason to doubt both. You can see how this kind of fix fits into a wider job on our what we fix page.

Be the same business everywhere

AI tools don't only read your website. They read Google, review sites, directories, Facebook and anywhere else your business appears, then try to work out whether all of those are the same company.

If your website says "Smith & Sons Electrical", Google says "Smith Electrical Ltd" and Facebook has an old phone number, you're making that job harder.

Pick one version of your name, address and phone number and use it everywhere. Start with your Google Business Profile, because it feeds Google Maps and a lot of what Google's AI shows. Then work through Facebook, Yell, Checkatrade or whatever directories matter in your trade. Link to those profiles from your website too. It's one of the 17 things our free check tests for.

Reviews and real answers

When people ask for "a good" plumber or "the best" café, AI tools lean on what other people have said. Reviews matter, and so does replying to them. You can't buy your way out of this one (and fake reviews are illegal in the UK), but you can ask happy customers. Most people will leave a review if you send them the link the same day.

The other thing that helps is answering the questions customers actually ask. "Do you do emergency call-outs?" "How much does a consumer unit replacement cost?" "Do you cover Haverhill?" A simple FAQ page with straight answers gives AI tools something to quote. Our own FAQ page is a working example.

Frequently asked questions

Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT's answers?

Not in the answers themselves. OpenAI has started showing ads in ChatGPT in some countries, but it says ads are kept separate and don't change what ChatGPT says. Anyone offering to "get you into ChatGPT" is really selling the groundwork in this guide.

How long does it take to show up?

Nobody knows exactly. Changes have to be crawled before they count, which can take days or weeks. Check again every few weeks rather than every day.

Do I need a new website?

Usually not. Most of what's in this guide can be done on the website you already have.

Does ChatGPT use Google reviews?

OpenAI doesn't publish a list of the sources it reads. What we can say is that AI tools look across the web for signs that a business is real and well thought of, and reviews on Google and trade sites are some of the most visible signs there are.

What to do this week

1. Ask ChatGPT about your trade and town, and note what it says.
2. Check your robots.txt for blocked AI crawlers, or let our free AI check do it for you.
3. Rewrite the top of your home page so it says what you do and where, in one plain sentence.
4. Make your name, address and phone number match across your website and Google Business Profile.

If you'd like a person to go through all of it with you, that's what our AI website audit is for. Either way, start with step one. It's free, and it'll tell you more than any article can.