There's no form. That's the first thing to understand. You can't submit your business to ChatGPT, you can't claim a profile, and you can't pay for placement. When ChatGPT recommends a plumber, a clinic or an agency, it's assembling that answer from what it can read on the open web: your website, Bing's index, directories, review platforms, Reddit threads, Wikipedia and the rest of its training data.
Which means getting recommended isn't a trick. It's a checklist. You make your business easy to find, easy to read and easy to verify, and you do it before your competitors do. Here's the playbook we run for our own clients, in the order we run it.
First, understand how the answer gets made
ChatGPT doesn't keep a ranked list of businesses. When someone asks for a recommendation, it pulls evidence from everywhere it can reach and names the businesses whose picture is complete and consistent enough to stake an answer on. Incomplete or contradictory businesses don't get named, however good they are.
We wrote a full breakdown of where that evidence comes from in how ChatGPT decides which businesses to recommend. This article is the other half: the work, step by step.
Step 1: baseline where you stand today
Before changing anything, find out what AI currently says about you. Open a fresh ChatGPT chat and ask the questions your customers would ask: "best [your service] in [your town]", "who should I use for [the problem you solve]", "is [your business name] any good?"
Screenshot the answer. That's your before photo. Now score yourself. Named and accurate: you're ahead of your area, protect and extend it. Named but described wrongly: urgent, you have a consistency problem, go to step 4. Not named at all: you're invisible in the fastest-growing place people ask for recommendations, and everything below is your to-do list.
Step 2: get into Bing's index
The single highest-leverage hour of work on this list. ChatGPT's live web search leans on Bing's index, and it also runs its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to fetch pages directly. Copilot, DuckDuckGo and parts of Perplexity use Bing too. So there are two jobs here: be in Bing's index, and don't block the AI crawlers.
Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. Then check your robots.txt isn't blocking OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot or ChatGPT-User. Plenty of sites block them by accident, usually from a template or a plugin default, and it's a silent way to stay invisible.
This is the most common gap we find when we audit independent business sites. Nobody looks at Bing, because "nobody uses Bing". Your customers don't. The AI they ask does.
Do this: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (you can import straight from Google Search Console in a few clicks), submit your sitemap, and claim your Bing Places listing while you're there. Then check back in a week to confirm your pages are actually being indexed.
Step 3: make your site machine-readable
An AI reads your site as source material. If your homepage opens with brand poetry and hides the facts, the AI moves on to a competitor whose page states them plainly.
Do this:
- State the facts in the first paragraph. What you do, who for, where, from what price. Declarative sentences. "We do X for Y in Z", not "we're passionate about helping".
- Add structured data. Organization, LocalBusiness with your address and area served, Service with prices, FAQPage on every page where questions fit. AI engines read JSON-LD directly. It's the difference between them extracting your facts and guessing at them.
- Add an
llms.txtfile. A plain-text index at your site root that tells AI crawlers what your business is and where the important pages are. Ours is here as a working example. It takes an hour.
If AI engines are still not citing you after this layer is in place, the diagnostic is our list of the seven blockers. Vague titles and hedging copy are the usual suspects.
Step 4: make your facts match everywhere
AI assistants cross-reference. Your name, address, phone number, services and prices should read identically on your site, your schema, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and every directory you're listed in. A business whose details agree everywhere reads as verifiable. One whose details contradict each other reads as risky, and risky doesn't get recommended.
Do this: pick the canonical version of every fact, then sweep your listings and bring them into line. Claim the ones you've never touched. Most UK business owners have listings on platforms they've never logged into. Boring work, high leverage.
Step 5: build genuine third-party evidence
Your own website is a claim. Everything written about you elsewhere is evidence, and AI assistants weight evidence heavily: reviews, directory profiles, press mentions, industry listings, forum threads.
Do this:
- Ask for detailed reviews. "Five stars, great work" tells a model nothing. A review that names the service and the town gives it quotable evidence. Change how you ask: "would you mind mentioning what we did and where you're based?"
- Spread reviews across at least two platforms. Google reviews alone leave gaps on the platforms some engines read instead.
- Get listed where your industry actually lives. The trade directories, professional bodies and local listings relevant to your vertical. Genuine ones only. A page of spam directory links helps nobody, and AI engines are trained on exactly the sources that ignore them.
No shortcuts here, and that's the point. This is the part competitors can't copy in a weekend.
Step 6: answer the questions your customers ask AI
People don't ask ChatGPT for keywords. They ask questions: "how much should a website cost?", "what's the difference between X and Y?", "is it worth paying for Z?" When an assistant answers, it cites the pages that answer the same question clearly.
Do this: write down the ten questions customers actually ask you before they buy. Publish a page or article answering each one, plainly, with the question in the heading and the answer in the first paragraph. One a month is enough. AI engines increasingly favour businesses with fresh, recent corroboration over ones whose trail went quiet. A steady drip beats a burst.
Ten questions to start with
Step 6 asks you for ten questions. Most owners stall there, so here they are. Change the wording to suit your trade, then give each one its own page with the question as the heading and the answer straight underneath.
- How much does it cost? Give a range or a starting price. "It depends" loses you the job.
- How long will it take? Typical timescales, start to finish.
- Do you cover my area? Name the towns and the radius, in words, not on a map.
- Are you insured and qualified? Certificates, memberships, accreditations. Spell them out.
- Can I see work you've done? Real jobs, real photos, ideally nearby.
- What happens if something goes wrong? Guarantees, warranties, callbacks.
- Do you give free quotes? And exactly how someone books one.
- How do I know which option I need? The question customers ask before they know what to buy.
- What makes you different from the others? Answer it plainly. This is the one AI repeats about you.
- How do I get started? The exact next step, in one line.
One a month is plenty. A site that keeps adding beats one that went quiet.
Honest expectations
This compounds over months. Bing indexing and site structure can move in weeks; the evidence trail takes a quarter or two to build weight. There's no instant switch, and anyone promising one is guessing or lying.
The compounding is also the good news. In most UK towns and niches, almost nobody has done this work yet. The first business in a category that becomes easy to verify tends to get named again and again, and each mention makes the next one more likely. Late movers have to displace an incumbent. Early movers just have to show up.
Recheck your baseline monthly, using the same questions from step 1. That's your scoreboard.
What this looked like for one client. A tattoo training academy went from 9 Google clicks a month to 174 in the first full month after we rebuilt their site and worked down this exact list, and went from being named in about half the AI answers we track to nine in ten. No ads. Shared with their permission, and written up in full in our Petite Ink Academy case study.
Want this as a printable checklist? Get the designed PDF version, including the ten questions and a tick-off sheet you can work through.
And if you'd rather hand the whole checklist to someone who does it every month, that's our SEO + GEO retainer: one bundled service, because about 80% of this work is shared with good SEO. Every engagement starts with a free audit that shows you exactly which of these six steps you're missing.
