How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI

Ask ChatGPT for “a good accountant in Middlesbrough” or “the best plumber near me” and you won’t get ten blue links. You’ll get three or four names, a line about each, and a confident recommendation. If your business isn’t one of them, for that customer you don’t exist.

This is no longer a future problem. Ofcom found that about 30% of UK searches now show an AI Overview, and that ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period a year before. Your customers are already asking AI who to hire.

The good news: the businesses getting named aren’t doing anything mysterious. Here’s what the evidence says decides it, and what you can fix this week.

Why does it matter if AI doesn’t mention you?

Because people click far less when an AI answer is on the page. Pew Research tracked real browsing and found that people who saw a Google AI summary clicked a normal search result on 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on just 1% of visits.

So the answer is the new shop window. If the AI names your competitor and not you, a lot of customers stop there.

Being on page one used to be the goal. Now the goal is being in the answer.

How do ChatGPT and Google’s AI decide who to recommend?

They recommend businesses they can reach, read and trust. That’s the whole game, and every tactic worth your time fits under one of those three words.

Google has been unusually clear about its side. Its guide for AI features, published in May 2026, says they are built on its “core Search ranking and quality systems”, and sums up optimising for generative AI search as “still SEO”. It lists the basics: make sure your content is crawlable, keep it useful and original, give a good page experience. It also says unique, useful content will likely matter more to your AI presence in the long run than anything else it suggests.

Just as useful is what Google says you don’t need: no special AI text files, no new markup and no special schema, and no need to rewrite your pages in a particular style for AI. If someone is selling you a magic “AI file”, be sceptical.

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity don’t publish a guide like Google’s, but they work in a similar way when they search the web: they fetch pages, read them, and build an answer from sources they judge reliable.

Can AI assistants actually reach your website?

This is the first thing to check, and it’s where a surprising number of sites fail without knowing it.

Your robots.txt might be blocking them. Each AI company has its own crawlers, with names like OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Some security plugins, firewalls and hosting setups can block them without you ever being told. If they’re blocked, the assistant can’t read your site when someone asks about you, however good it is.

There’s an important difference between bots that train AI models (like GPTBot) and bots that search and cite in real time (like OAI-SearchBot). Many businesses reasonably choose to block training. Blocking the search bots means you can’t be quoted at all.

Can AI read the words on your pages?

Here’s the one most people miss. Research by Vercel and MERJ found that none of the major AI crawlers render JavaScript. ChatGPT’s and Claude’s crawlers fetch JavaScript files but don’t run them.

Many modern websites send a nearly empty page and build the words with JavaScript in the browser. You see a lovely site. An AI crawler sees a blank shell. Google’s own crawler does run JavaScript, which is why a site can rank in Google and still be invisible to ChatGPT.

The fix depends on your platform, but the test is simple: your key words (who you are, what you do, where you are, how to contact you) should be in the page’s HTML before any scripts run.

What makes AI trust one business over another?

Once an assistant can read you, it has to decide whether you’re the safe answer. Three things carry weight.

1. Clear, specific facts. Say plainly what you do, where, for whom and since when. “Family-run electricians covering Stockton, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool since 2009, NICEIC approved” gives an AI something it can repeat with confidence. “Delivering excellence in electrical solutions” gives it nothing. Researchers who coined the term GEO (generative engine optimisation) showed in a 2024 study that changing how a page presents its content could boost its visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. Being specific and easy to quote is the heart of it; stuffing in keywords isn’t.

2. Answers to real questions. Customers ask AI full questions: “How much does a boiler service cost in Leeds?” Pages that answer them directly, near the top, in a sentence that stands on its own, are easy to quote.

3. What the rest of the web says about you. This is the big one. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that branded web mentions correlated strongly with AI visibility (between 0.66 and 0.71), while backlinks showed only a weak correlation. The strongest single predictor was YouTube mentions, at about 0.737. Correlation isn’t proof of cause, but the direction is clear: AI leans on what other people say about you, not just what you say about yourself.

For local businesses, Google’s guide also points directly at your Google Business Profile, saying an accurate profile can help you be visible in AI responses as well as normal results.

Seven things you can do this week

None of these need a developer for most small business sites, and none cost anything.

1. Check that AI search bots can get in. Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and look for lines that block OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. If in doubt, a free Spyglo check lists every AI bot and whether it can reach you.
2. Check your words are visible without JavaScript. If your homepage text only appears after scripts load, ask your web person about server-side rendering or static pages.
3. Write one honest sentence about what you do. Service, place, who it’s for, and one fact that proves it (years trading, qualifications, number of jobs). Put it near the top of your homepage.
4. Answer the five questions you get asked most. Price ranges, areas covered, how long things take. Give each a heading and answer it in the first sentence underneath.
5. Complete your Google Business Profile. Categories, hours, services, photos, and replies to reviews. Make sure your name, address and phone number match your website exactly.
6. Earn real mentions. Local news, trade bodies, supplier pages, directories in your industry, a short YouTube video showing your work. One genuine mention on a trusted site beats a pile of paid links.
7. Ask the AIs yourself, every month. Type the questions your customers would ask into ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and note whether you’re named.

How do you know if it’s working?

Be careful here, because AI answers are far less stable than search rankings. SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 2,961 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI and found less than a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of brands twice, and the same list in the same order less than 0.1% of the time.

That means any tool promising you an “AI ranking” from a single question is measuring noise. What you can trust is frequency: ask the same handful of questions regularly and track how often you’re named. If that number climbs over a few months, your work is paying off.

Google is also helping. Search Console now has a report showing your impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, so check it alongside your own monthly tests.

The bottom line

Getting recommended by AI isn’t a new dark art. It’s the fundamentals of being findable, done properly, plus a couple of new checks that most websites have never had: are the AI bots allowed in, and can they read your words without JavaScript?

Start with what you control: your own site. Then build the reputation around it. The businesses that do this now, while most competitors haven’t noticed the shift, will be the names AI repeats for years.

Not sure where your site stands? Run a free Spyglo check. In about a minute it shows whether AI assistants can reach and read your site, and gives you a plain-English fix for every gap. If you’re new to the idea, our guide to what GEO is is a good next read.