How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and Google AI
No one can promise an AI assistant will recommend you. You can make it far easier for them to find, understand and trust your business.
How AI assistants choose who to mention
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews for "a good electrician in Derby", the answer is built from pages the assistant can read and sources it trusts: business websites, Google Business Profiles, review sites, directories and local news. If your business is hard to find in those places, or your website does not say plainly what you do and where, you are less likely to be mentioned.
Anyone promising a guaranteed AI recommendation is overselling. What you can do is remove the obstacles and give the assistants good material.
Check you are not blocking them
Some websites block AI crawlers in their robots.txt file, often by accident or through a security plugin. If GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot are blocked, those assistants cannot read your site. Our free website check tells you in a few seconds.
Say plainly who you are, what you do and where
- A page for each main service, named the way customers search for it.
- Your town and the areas you cover, written on the page, not only in a map.
- Prices or price ranges where you can give them.
- Questions customers ask, answered on the page in a sentence or two.
- Structured data (a small block of code) describing your business, address and opening hours.
Be findable away from your website
- A complete Google Business Profile with photos, services and up-to-date hours.
- Reviews from customers on Google, ideally mentioning the job they had done.
- The same name, address and phone number on every directory listing.
- Mentions on local sites: suppliers, trade bodies, clubs and the local press.
Test it yourself
Ask a few assistants the questions your customers ask, such as "best [your trade] in [your town]", and note who comes up. Do it every month or so. If competitors appear and you do not, look at what their websites and profiles say that yours does not.
If you want a hand, our AI search optimisation service does this work, and our free website check is a quick place to start.