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You can’t pay ChatGPT to recommend your business, and there’s no ranking to claim. When someone asks it for a plumber in Shrewsbury or a holiday cottage near Ludlow, it searches the web, reads what it finds and names the businesses those pages describe best. So the job is to make sure it can reach your website, that your website says plainly what you do and where, and that other websites mention you too.
This guide covers each step for a UK small business, in the order we’d do them.
How ChatGPT decides which businesses to name
When a question needs up-to-date facts, ChatGPT runs a web search before it answers. It doesn’t search the exact words the person typed. It turns the question into one or more shorter searches, such as “emergency plumber Shrewsbury reviews”, then reads the pages that come back and writes an answer with links to its sources.
Three things follow from that:
- If OpenAI’s search crawler is blocked from your website, ChatGPT can’t use it.
- Most people ask for a type of business in a place, not for you by name. Your pages need to use the same plain words: the service and the town.
- ChatGPT often cites other people’s pages, such as local guides, “best of” lists and directories. Being mentioned there counts as much as your own site.
Step 1: Let OpenAI’s search crawler in
OpenAI uses different crawlers for different jobs, and they’re easy to mix up:
- OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT’s search answers. This is the one that matters here. According to OpenAI, a website that turns it away is left out of ChatGPT’s search results.
- GPTBot collects pages to train future AI models. You can block it without affecting search.
- ChatGPT-User fetches a page when someone asks ChatGPT to look at it during a chat. It has no say in what appears in search.
Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt in a browser. If you see User-agent: OAI-SearchBot followed by Disallow: /, the search crawler is blocked. A file that only says User-agent: * and Allow: / lets everything in, which is fine. OpenAI says changes to robots.txt take about a day to be picked up.
Robots.txt isn’t the only thing that can block a crawler. Services such as Cloudflare have settings that block AI bots, and some security plugins do the same. If you use one, check its bot settings and make sure OAI-SearchBot is allowed. OpenAI publishes the IP addresses its crawlers use, so a firewall rule can let them in without opening the door to everything else.
Step 2: Get your site into Bing
ChatGPT doesn’t rely only on OpenAI’s own crawler. It also sends searches to partner search engines, and Bing has long been one of them, and many small business websites have never been checked in Bing at all, because everyone watches Google.
- Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools. If you already use Google Search Console, you can import your site from it in a few clicks.
- Submit your sitemap, usually yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml.
- Look at the pages Bing has indexed and fix any it reports as blocked or broken.
- Turn on IndexNow if your website supports it. It tells Bing straight away when a page is added or changed, instead of waiting for the next crawl. Several WordPress SEO plugins include it.
Step 3: Say what you do on your homepage, in plain words
The page ChatGPT links to most often for a business is its homepage. The first lines of that page should say what you sell, who it’s for and where you work.
Compare these two openings for the same business:
- “Quality you can trust. Solutions for every home.”
- “Plumber in Shrewsbury for leaks, boiler repairs and bathroom fitting. Gas Safe registered, covering Shrewsbury and villages within 15 miles.”
The first gives an AI tool nothing to work with. The second answers the question a customer is likely to ask. Put your main service and town in the page title and the main heading, and keep the slogan for further down if you want it. Our homepage headline generator can help you write a clear one.
Step 4: Give each service and area its own page
One page that lists twelve services in a single paragraph is hard for anyone to quote. A page for each main service is easier, with:
- what the service is and what’s included
- who it’s for, and the towns you cover
- a rough price or how you price it
- a few common questions with short, direct answers
Do the same for the places you serve, but only where you genuinely work there and have something specific to say. Twenty copies of the same page with a different town name swapped in won’t help.
Keep the details current and show when a page was last updated. ChatGPT’s searches often include the current year, so a page with prices from 2022 looks out of date next to one updated this month.
Step 5: Get mentioned on other websites
You don’t control most of the pages ChatGPT reads. Local “best of” articles, town guides, trade body directories and review sites all show up as sources. To find the ones that matter for your business:
- Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers would ask, such as “best electrician in Oswestry” or “dog-friendly pubs near Welshpool”.
- Open the sources it links to.
- Make a note of every list, guide or directory that appears more than once.
Then work through that list. Contact the people who write the guides and lists, tell them what you do and where, and ask to be considered. Make sure you’re listed with the trade bodies you belong to, such as Gas Safe, NICEIC or your local chamber of commerce. Keep asking happy customers for Google reviews, since reviews come up in local answers. Our Google review link generator gives you a link that opens the review box directly.
Don’t buy reviews or pay for a place on a list. Since April 2025, buying fake reviews has been banned under UK consumer law, and review sites remove them.
Step 6: Keep your details the same everywhere
If your website says one phone number, your Google Business Profile another and an old directory a third, an AI tool can’t be sure which is right. Check that your business name, address, phone number, opening hours and the areas you cover match on:
- your website
- your Google Business Profile
- Bing Places
- Facebook, and any directories you’re listed in
Adding local business schema to your website also helps. It puts those same details into your page code in a format machines read easily. Our local business schema generator writes it for you.
Step 7: Claim your business in ChatGPT
On 10 November 2026, OpenAI launched Businesses in ChatGPT, in beta. It lets a business claim its profile, correct its details and see how often ChatGPT mentions it. OpenAI says eligible businesses in countries where ChatGPT is available can claim, which should include the UK. At the time of writing, it’s aimed at businesses that have a website.
To claim, you sign in to ChatGPT, open Business Hub and add your business. You’ll be asked to prove you own the website by adding a TXT record to your domain’s DNS, and to verify your identity. If your domain uses our nameservers, you add the record in cPanel. See how to edit DNS records in cPanel.
It’s worth doing so that ChatGPT has your correct details, and the figures on mentions and clicks are useful. But OpenAI is clear that claiming doesn’t move you up its recommendations. Treat it as tidying up your facts, not as a shortcut.
What you can skip
- An llms.txt file. This is a proposed file that tells AI tools what’s on your site. There’s no good evidence that ChatGPT uses it, and studies covering hundreds of thousands of websites found that sites with one were cited no more often than sites without.
- Anyone who guarantees a top spot in ChatGPT. Nobody controls what it recommends, and the answers change from one day to the next.
- Rewriting your whole site for AI. The things that help in ChatGPT are mostly the same things that help in Google: clear pages, accurate details and other websites mentioning you.
How to tell if it’s working
Don’t judge it on one answer. Ask the same question again and you can get a different list. Instead:
- Write down five to ten questions your customers ask, such as “who fits log burners near Ludlow?”.
- Ask each one three times, in a new chat each time.
- Count how many of the answers name you, and note which sources are linked.
- Repeat once a month and compare.
If you’ve claimed your business, Business Hub’s figures add to this. Expect far more mentions than clicks. Many people read the answer and then search for you by name or ring you, so your website statistics won’t show everything ChatGPT does for you.
Want help with this?
Most of these steps take an afternoon. If you’d rather we did them, our AI search visibility service checks your website, listings and schema and fixes what’s missing, for one fixed price.