How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI Answers

Why this question suddenly matters

Ask ChatGPT for a good accountant in Leicester who works with contractors and it won't hand you ten blue links. It names two or three firms, says why, and moves on. If you're not one of them, you're not in the conversation at all.

That's the shift. Google has shown AI Overviews above UK search results since 2024, and in July 2025 it brought AI Mode, its fully conversational search, to UK users. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot all answer 'who should I use?' questions directly. Plenty of people still scroll past the AI summary and click an ordinary result. But for the questions that end in a purchase, being the name in the answer is turning into the new page one.

How AI assistants decide who to recommend

There's no secret ranking factor, and anyone selling you one is guessing. What we do know is how these tools work. When you ask something that needs current information, the assistant runs a search in the background, reads a handful of pages and writes its answer from what it found. Google's AI features draw on Google's own index. ChatGPT search uses OpenAI's own crawler alongside third-party search providers.

So an assistant can only recommend you if three things are true. It can reach your pages. It can tell from them, quickly, what you do, where and for whom. And it finds enough agreement elsewhere on the web to be confident you're real and reputable. Miss any one of those and you're relying on luck.

Step one: make sure the crawlers can get in

This sounds too basic to mention, and it's where problems turn up most often. Check your robots.txt file (yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt) and your hosting or CDN settings. Some hosting companies and security plugins now block AI crawlers by default, and they don't always tell you.

OpenAI runs separate crawlers for separate jobs, and its documentation says they're independent. GPTBot collects material for training future models. OAI-SearchBot is the one that puts sites into ChatGPT's search answers. You can block the first and allow the second, but if OAI-SearchBot is blocked you won't be shown in ChatGPT search at all. Google works differently: Googlebot handles both ordinary results and AI Overviews, and the separate Google-Extended setting only controls whether your content is used for Gemini, not whether you appear in Search.

Ask whoever looks after your website to check the server logs for visits from these crawlers and confirm they get a normal page back, not an error or a block.

Step two: write pages a machine can quote

AI answers are built from passages. When an assistant needs to explain why you're a good fit, it looks for a clear sentence it can lift or paraphrase. Pages full of 'innovative solutions tailored to your needs' give it nothing to work with.

Go through your main service pages and check that each one says, in plain words near the top, what the service is, who it's for, where you work and what makes you different. Then answer the questions buyers actually ask. How long does it take? What does the process look like? What do you need from me? Do you work with businesses my size? Put those answers on the page, under headings that match the question.

Specific beats clever. 'We fit air source heat pumps across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, mostly in older homes with solid walls' will get quoted. 'Sustainable heating, reimagined' won't.

Step three: be consistent everywhere you're mentioned

Assistants cross-check. If your Google Business Profile shows one address, your website another and an old directory listing a third, you look less certain, and an uncertain business is an easy one to leave out.

Make the basics identical everywhere: business name, address, phone number, opening hours and the one-line description of what you do. Then think about where else you ought to be mentioned. Trade bodies, local business groups, partner and supplier pages, directories people genuinely use, and honest reviews on platforms your customers trust. A third party vouching for you carries weight that no amount of self-description can match.

Structured data helps too. Organisation and LocalBusiness markup on your site tells machines, in their own format, who you are and how to reach you. It isn't a ranking trick. It just removes ambiguity.

Step four: publish things worth citing

When an assistant explains a topic, it leans on sources that explain it well. That's your opening. If you're the business in your area with the clearest guide to, say, planning permission for garden rooms, you're more likely to be drawn on when someone asks about it, and more likely to be named when they ask who can help.

This isn't a call to churn out posts. One genuinely useful article that answers a real question in full, written by someone who clearly does the work, is worth more than twenty generic ones. Google has said it rewards helpful content however it's produced, and that mass-producing pages to manipulate rankings breaks its spam policies. The assistants inherit that preference because they're built on search.

How to tell whether it's working

Traffic from AI assistants is still small for most businesses and hard to measure precisely, so don't judge this on analytics alone. A simpler habit works better. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot the questions your customers would ask, in the words they'd use, and note who gets named. Try it with your town, your specialism and your competitors' names, and keep a simple log. You'll quickly see whether you're in the answers, who is, and what those businesses have that you don't.

In GA4 you can also look for visits referred from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar sources. Some visits arrive without a referrer, so it won't catch everything, but the trend is worth watching.

The honest summary

Getting recommended by AI isn't a separate discipline with its own tricks. It's search, content and reputation, done properly and kept consistent. The businesses that show up well in AI answers are mostly the ones that were already clear about what they do and made it easy to check. If your site is vague, your listings are out of date or a setting somewhere is blocking the crawlers, fix those first. They cost little, and plenty of businesses still haven't done them.