How to Get Your UK Business Recommended by ChatGPT

Ask a London business owner what they want from AI search and the answer is nearly always the same: to be the name ChatGPT gives when a customer asks who to use. It is a reasonable ambition, and an unusually hard one, because ChatGPT is far more selective than Google's local results.

I am based in London and most of what I do is local visibility, so this is a question I get weekly. There is no secret switch, and anyone selling one is selling hope. What there is, is a short list of things that decide whether you are even eligible to be named, and most UK businesses fail at least one of them.

How often does ChatGPT actually recommend local businesses?

Rarely. A 2026 study found ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of the business locations it analysed, against 11% for Gemini and 7.4% for Perplexity. The data comes from SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index, covering nearly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands, as reported by Search Engine Land.

The study also found that fewer than half of the brands leading in Google local visibility appeared among the most visible in AI results. That is the point I want you to take away. Ranking in the Map Pack and being recommended by ChatGPT are related, but they are not the same achievement.

Can ChatGPT see my website at all?

Only if you let OpenAI's search crawler in. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. It recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and allowing requests from its published IP ranges.

The most common failure I find is not a deliberate block. It is a security plugin, a CDN rule or a managed host that blocks unfamiliar bots by default, so the business has been invisible to the crawler for months without anybody deciding that. I cover the settings in the post on AI crawlers and robots.txt. Check that first. It costs nothing and it is the one true gate.

Does ChatGPT use Bing?

Third-party sources widely report that ChatGPT draws on Bing results for web answers, but OpenAI's crawler page does not say so. I read that page, and it describes OAI-SearchBot as the crawler that surfaces websites in ChatGPT search. I am separating what is documented from what is reported because the second is often stated as fact online.

Given that uncertainty, my advice is cheap insurance rather than a bet. Claim your Bing Places listing and verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools. It takes an hour, it helps in Bing regardless, and if the reports are right it closes a gap that most UK businesses have left open.

What facts does ChatGPT need to be sure about?

Your name, address, phone number, services and area need to be identical across the places an AI system can read. SOCi found that business profile information was only about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity, against 100% on Gemini, which it describes as grounded in Google Maps. A system that is unsure about a fact has a simple way to protect itself: it leaves the business out.

• One trading name, spelled and punctuated the same way on the website, Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories.
• One address format, matching the profile character for character. London suite and floor numbers cause more inconsistency than anything else.
• One phone number that you control, tap-to-call on the site.
• A service list that agrees between the site, the profile and any directory.
• Opening hours that are current, including bank holidays.

This is the entity work I describe in what entity building actually is. It is dull, it is entirely within your control, and in my experience it is the largest single gap on UK small business sites.

What kind of mentions help?

Independent sources that describe you the same way you describe yourself. Your own site is the least persuasive thing you control, because you wrote it. What adds confidence is agreement from places you did not write: Companies House, your trade body or regulator, a supplier's stockist page, local press, reputable directories in your sector and genuine customer reviews.

Be wary of anyone selling mentions in bulk. Google's own guidance on its AI features says seeking inauthentic mentions is not as helpful as it might seem, and OpenAI's systems face the same incentive to ignore manufactured signals. A handful of real, relevant mentions beats a hundred bought ones, and the real ones are also what a human customer sees when they check you out.

Do reviews affect whether ChatGPT names me?

They appear to act as a filter. SOCi reported that ChatGPT-recommended locations averaged 4.3 stars and that AI systems treated reviews as a qualification threshold rather than a ranking signal. In traditional local search a middling rating can still rank on proximity and category. In the AI results SOCi studied, those locations were frequently excluded altogether.

For a London business the practical reading is that a rating well below the field is a bigger risk than a low review count. I go through this in the post on reviews and AI recommendations.

What should my website say?

It should answer the questions a buyer asks, directly, in the first sentence under each heading. A recommendation engine has to justify a name, and it can only justify one it can describe. If your pages say 'we offer a range of services across London', there is nothing to quote. If they say 'we replace boilers in houses across zones 2 to 4, usually within a week, from £X', there is.

• What you do, for whom, and where, stated plainly on the homepage and service pages.
• Prices or honest ranges wherever you can give them.
• Who does the work, by name, with credentials.
• Proof you can point to: real jobs, real numbers, real reviews.
• The comparison questions: how you differ from a cheaper or bigger alternative.

How do 'near me' and London-specific prompts change things?

People search London by landmark, station and neighbourhood, not by borough name, so your pages need to say where you actually are in those terms. A customer asks for a dentist near Liverpool Street or a plumber around Stoke Newington. An assistant can only match that if the places appear in text it can read, on your site and in your profile.

• Say where you are in plain words: the street, the borough, the nearest station and a one-line walking direction.
• Name the areas you genuinely serve, the ones you could speak about in detail, not every postcode in Greater London.
• Keep it consistent with the profile. The address and service area on the site must agree with the Google Business Profile.
• Do not stuff. A list of forty neighbourhoods is the kind of page I explain how to avoid in the post on borough pages.

What should I not expect?

Do not expect a guaranteed position, a fast result or the same answer twice. The same prompt can return different businesses on different days, and nobody outside these companies can promise you a placement. Treat any provider who does as a red flag, in the same way you would treat a promise of a number one Google ranking.

A realistic aim is to move from absent to sometimes named, then from sometimes to reliably, over months rather than weeks. You track that as a rate across repeated prompts, and you judge the work by the enquiries it produces, not by one screenshot of a good answer.

What would I do in the first month?

1. Check the crawler gate. Confirm OAI-SearchBot is allowed, and that no CDN, host or plugin is blocking it.
2. Fix the facts. Audit name, address, phone and services across the site, profile and top ten directories, and correct the differences.
3. Claim Bing Places and verify Bing Webmaster Tools.
4. Rewrite the top three pages so each section opens with a direct answer and a specific.
5. Start a review flow if one is not running, and answer every review.
6. Run a simple audit of what ChatGPT says about you now, which I explain in how to check your AI visibility.

None of this guarantees a recommendation, and I would not work with anyone who promised one. What it does is move you from the group the system cannot safely name to the group it can. For a UK business that is most of the available gain, and it is the same work that helps every other search surface. If you want a read on where you stand, my AI search visibility service starts there.