How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT and AI assistants?

A question that used to go into a search box — "who's good for this near me" — is increasingly typed to an assistant instead, and the answer comes back as a short list rather than ten links. If you are not in the short list you are not in the consideration set at all. The encouraging part is that the work required is mostly work that was already worth doing.

What these systems are actually doing

Two different things, and the difference decides what you can influence.

Recall from training. The model absorbed a large amount of public text at some point in the past. Small local businesses are rarely in there in any reliable way, and you cannot edit it.

Retrieval, live. Most assistants now search the web while answering and quote what they find. This is the part that matters for a small business, because it is happening today against pages that exist today.

So the practical goal is not "get into the model". It is be the thing that gets retrieved and quoted when someone asks a question you can answer.

What makes a page quotable

An assistant is assembling an answer, not ranking a list. It needs sentences it can lift with confidence. That rewards a particular kind of writing, and it is not the kind most business websites contain.

Answer one question per heading

A heading that reads "How much does a full rewire cost?" followed by a direct answer is easy to quote. A heading that reads "Our Services" followed by three paragraphs of welcome is not. The service page structure that works for humans works here for the same reason: it is unambiguous what answers what.

Put the fact in a plain sentence

State it. "We cover Leeds and within twenty miles." "A standard service takes about two hours." "We are open Saturday mornings until one." Facts wrapped in marketing language — we pride ourselves on our extensive coverage — contain no extractable information, and get skipped in favour of a competitor who simply said the thing.

Be specific enough to be checkable

Vague claims are unusable. Numbers, places, times, named services and real constraints are all quotable. This is the same instinct as what makes people trust you, which is not a coincidence — both readers are looking for evidence that a real business is behind the words.

Consistency across the web matters more than you would guess

Retrieval systems corroborate. If your address, phone number, opening hours and trading name are the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, and the directories you are listed in, that agreement is a signal the facts are reliable. If four sources disagree, the safe move for the system is to say less about you, or nothing.

This is unglamorous and it is the single most common fixable problem. An afternoon reconciling your listings is worth more than any amount of clever writing.

Start with your Google Business Profile, then whatever industry directories your trade actually uses.

Other people's pages count

What is said about you elsewhere is frequently what gets quoted. Local press, a supplier's stockist page, a trade body listing, a community site, a genuine mention in a roundup. These carry weight partly because you did not write them.

You cannot buy your way into this honestly, and attempts to do so at scale are visible. What works is the ordinary version: be listed where your trade is legitimately listed, and be worth mentioning locally.

Do not accidentally block the crawlers

Worth thirty seconds of checking, because it is silently fatal. Some website builders and security plugins block AI crawlers by default, or block everything that is not a search engine. If a system cannot fetch your page it cannot quote it.

Your robots.txt is at yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt — open it and look. If you see a long list of disallowed user agents you did not put there, find out what put it there before assuming it is fine. Blocking AI crawlers is a legitimate choice some businesses make deliberately; making it by accident is not.

Where reviews fit

Recommendation questions frequently get answered from review platforms, because that is where the corroborated public opinion lives. A business with thirty genuine recent reviews is easier to say something about than one with three from 2023.

Get them the lawful way — see how to get more reviews, which covers the shortcuts that now breach UK law as well as platform policy.

What nobody can promise you

Be straightforward about this, because a market of people selling certainty is forming.

• No one can guarantee a mention. Not us, not an agency. The systems are opaque, they change, and they differ from each other.
• Answers vary run to run. Asking the same question twice can produce different businesses. A single test proves very little.
• You cannot correct the model directly. If an assistant says something wrong about you, the realistic fix is to publish the correct fact clearly and get it corroborated, then wait.
• Emerging conventions are unproven. There are proposed files and formats intended to help AI systems read a site. They cost little to add and there is not yet good public evidence that any of them changes outcomes. Add them if you like; do not pay someone much for them.

What to actually do, in order

1. Fix consistency. Same name, address, phone, hours everywhere. One afternoon.
2. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Every field.
3. Check robots.txt is not blocking what you did not mean to block.
4. Write one page per real question customers ask, with the answer stated plainly under a heading that is the question.
5. Put the practical facts in text, not only in images or a PDF. An assistant reads the words.
6. Keep collecting genuine reviews.
7. Ask an assistant about your trade and area occasionally. Note who it names and what it says. That is your baseline, not a scoreboard.

The reassuring conclusion

None of the above is a new discipline. It is the same work that makes a site useful to a person in a hurry: say what you do, where, for how much, plainly, and be consistent about it everywhere. Businesses that did that already are the ones getting quoted, which is a considerably better outcome than the alternative where the trick is expensive and nobody knows what it is.

The bottom line

You cannot edit the model, so aim to be retrieved. Make your facts consistent across the web, claim your Google Business Profile, do not block the crawlers, and write pages where the heading is the question and the next sentence is the answer. Nobody can guarantee a mention, and anyone who does is selling you something. See also getting found on Google.