ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of local businesses on average. Google’s local 3-pack surfaces them 35.9% of the time, so anyone working out how to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT is looking at a channel roughly three to thirty times harder to win than a normal local ranking. Both figures come from SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index, which analysed 2,751 brands and around 350,000 locations.
Type your trade and your town into ChatGPT, fail to find yourself, and you are in the overwhelming majority.
The agency LLM Listed studied 500 UK business websites and found 87% effectively invisible across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on commercially relevant questions in their industry. 91% showed no evidence of any AI visibility strategy at all. Almost nobody in your trade is working on this yet, which is precisely why a small business can still get in.
This is not theoretical. One of our clients is now the number one recommended local practice in ChatGPT for its category and area, published in full on our case studies page.
Nothing below is a guarantee, and the one thing you genuinely cannot do is pay for it. Six steps follow, in order, including one you can run today in about twenty minutes.
Step 1: Accept that you cannot pay your way in
You have probably had the email. “For $499, we’ll submit your business to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI platforms so you appear in AI search results.” In the UK it arrives as a cold email or a LinkedIn message with a monthly fee attached.
There is nothing to buy. OpenAI began testing ads inside ChatGPT in the US on 9 February 2026, and its help documentation is blunt about what those ads do not do: advertisers “have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses”, and “paying for placement gives you no influence over the answer above it”. The ads run on a system entirely separate from the chat model, and Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users see none at all. That is OpenAI’s documentation, not an agency’s opinion.
The organic side has no door either. As Surmado puts it: “Anyone claiming you can pay to get listed in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, or any other AI model is lying… There is no submission form.” These services either do nothing or add you to random directories the models ignore anyway.
Ask ChatGPT for a roofer in your city and it assembles the answer at that moment, from a small number of sources that already list several businesses: directories, “best X in [town]” listicles, Reddit threads and your Google Business Profile. It does not crawl and rank individual websites the way Google’s link graph does. Getting your business mentioned in ChatGPT means getting named inside those few sources.
No paid shortcut is genuinely good news if you are small. The budget gap that decides who wins Google Ads does not decide this one.
Step 2: Get a baseline before you change anything
This step costs nothing, needs no software, and takes about twenty minutes. Most guides on this subject quietly assume you already own a paid audit tool. You don’t need one.
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Write at least five prompts a customer would actually type. Each needs a place name in it, and none of them may include your business name. A branded prompt tells you nothing about whether you get recommended. Examples: “best roofer near Manchester”, “recommend a dentist in Widnes”, “who should I use for emergency boiler repair in Warrington”, “best family solicitor in Chester”.
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Run each prompt three times, in a fresh logged-out or incognito session every time. Logged-in chat history skews answers towards businesses you have already discussed, so testing while signed in flatters you.
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Log five things per run: did you appear, in what position, which attributes were attached to you, what the sentiment was, and which sources were cited under the answer. The sources column earns its keep: it tells you which directories and listicles ChatGPT is genuinely reading for your trade and your town, and it feeds Step 5 directly.
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Work out your mention rate. Appearances divided by total runs. Five prompts run three times is fifteen runs, so two appearances is a 13% baseline. Write today’s date beside it.
One vague prompt is a gut check, not an audit. Answers vary between runs by design, which is why you run each prompt three times. Run the same set through Gemini and Perplexity for comparison if you like, but keep ChatGPT as the thing you are measuring.
Step 3: Fill out your Google Business Profile properly, not partially
Your Google Business Profile is the highest-leverage free asset you own, and most are half filled in. Four fixes, in priority order.
Primary category first. It is the most influential local relevance factor for AI-era visibility, ahead of secondary categories, services and description text. Pick the most specific genuine match, not the broadest: a roofer set to “Contractor” rather than “Roofing contractor” is competing in the wrong pool. Then add genuine secondary categories.
Complete the Products and Services section in full. It is cited as the highest-impact single change available, with businesses reportedly appearing in local AI Overviews within four to eight weeks, a vendor-reported figure rather than a proven one. List every service as its own entry with its own description, in customers’ words, not trade jargon.
List service areas as separate entries. They match granular “near me in [suburb]” queries, so a Widnes plumber lists Widnes, Runcorn, Warrington and Speke individually rather than setting a 15-mile radius. Only towns you actually serve: inventing coverage breaks Google’s rules and wastes the enquiry anyway.
Reconcile your NAP. AI models cross-reference name, address and phone consistency across citations before recommending anyone, so your website, profile and every directory listing should match character for character. The usual UK failure is an old mobile number or a pre-move address on a legacy directory. That is the dull half of a full Google Business Profile audit, and the half people skip.
One caveat. Your profile feeds Google’s AI Overviews and Gemini fairly directly, but ChatGPT reaches it indirectly, via Bing’s index and third-party citations. Fix only your profile and you plateau, which is what the next two steps are for.
Step 4: Check that ChatGPT is actually allowed to read your site
You can do everything else in this guide correctly and still stay invisible because of two lines in a file most business owners have never opened. Type yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt into a browser and read it now.
OpenAI runs three separate crawlers with different jobs:
- GPTBot collects data used to train OpenAI’s models. Blocking it is a legitimate choice and does not remove you from ChatGPT’s live search results.
- OAI-SearchBot is the one that matters. It surfaces and links to sites in ChatGPT’s live search and answer results and is not used for training. Block it and you cannot be surfaced at all.
- ChatGPT-User fetches a specific page when someone references it directly in a chat. Worth allowing too.
These are separate rules in robots.txt, which is the part almost everybody gets wrong: a site can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User. If a developer or a plugin blocked “AI bots” wholesale, that likely took OAI-SearchBot down with it. Search the file for all three names and confirm OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User are not disallowed.
JavaScript is the second thing to check. Content that only appears after a script runs may never be seen by these crawlers, so your services, towns, phone number and opening hours need to sit in the page’s actual HTML, not in a script, an accordion widget or an image. The non-technical check: load the page, use your browser’s find function and search for a service you offer. If it is genuinely there, it will be found.
If someone has sold you an llms.txt file as the fix, that was not the thing blocking you.
Step 5: Get named in the sources ChatGPT already trusts
SEO practitioner theseoguy_ describes the pattern: “Businesses that are nowhere to be found in Google are showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Mode. No first page rankings. No map pack. A website with 4 backlinks. But you ask ChatGPT for a roofer in their city and there they are.”
An observation, not a study, but it matches the mechanism from Step 1: the answer is assembled from a handful of sources that already list several businesses, so being named inside them beats a strong site nobody cites. A weak SEO profile is not disqualifying.
Reviews set the bar. Businesses ChatGPT recommends average 4.3 stars, against 3.9 for Gemini and 4.2 for Perplexity, per the same SOCi index. A sub-four-star average is unlikely to be surfaced, so 4.3 is the working target, not “get more reviews”. Ask recent customers, and reply to every review, the bad ones included.
Yelp licensed its reviews, ratings and photos to OpenAI, a deal disclosed in February 2026 and reported by Axios on 23 July 2026, so ChatGPT can surface Yelp data directly in local answers. It is non-exclusive and also feeds Yahoo and Apple Maps. But Yelp’s UK trade coverage is thin, so that pipeline mostly does not reach a plumber in Runcorn.
What does apply: Google Business Profile reviews, Trustpilot, and Checkatrade, which vets over 48,000 tradespeople through up to 12 checks and holds 4.6/5 on Trustpilot. Then the ones everyone ignores: “best [trade] in [town]” listicles, local directory pages and Reddit threads. Go back to the sources column in your Step 2 log, find the pages ChatGPT cited for your trade and town, and get listed on those rather than blitzing every directory.
Step 6: Give it two to three months, then run the same audit again
Most people do this work, check three days later, see nothing, and conclude it does not work. None of these systems update on your schedule.
Multiple vendors converge on roughly 8 to 12 weeks for broader AI search visibility to move, with some Google Business Profile changes showing sooner at around 4 to 8 weeks. Those are vendor-reported ranges rather than controlled studies, so treat them as a rough expectation and not a promise.
Then re-run Step 2 exactly: the same five or more prompts, the same three runs each, the same fresh logged-out sessions, logged on a dated line underneath your baseline. Change the prompts and the comparison is worthless. The number that matters is the movement in your mention rate. Watch the cited sources too, because new sources citing you usually moves before the recommendation itself does.
Being known to a model is not the same as being recommended by it, and the first sign of progress is normally appearing occasionally rather than every time.
It does work. One of our clients became the number one recommended local practice in ChatGPT for its category and area by doing the things above, and the result is written up on our case studies page so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
If you would rather not run the six steps yourself, this is the work we do. Tell us what you do and where, and you will get a straight answer on whether we can help.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I pay to get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
No. OpenAI’s own documentation states that advertisers cannot shape, rank or alter ChatGPT’s responses, and the organic answers have no submission form or listing database behind them. Any agency charging a fee to submit you is selling something that doesn’t exist.
How does ChatGPT choose businesses to recommend?
It builds the answer as you ask, from a small number of sources that already list several businesses: directories, “best of” listicles, Reddit threads and your Google Business Profile. It does not rank websites the way Google does, so being named in those sources beats site authority.
Does my Google Business Profile directly control whether ChatGPT recommends me?
Not directly, and not on its own. Google’s AI Overviews and Gemini draw on your profile fairly directly; ChatGPT reaches it indirectly, through Bing’s index and third-party citations. A complete profile is among the highest-leverage free actions available, but it will not carry the job alone.
Which review sites matter for a UK business?
Google Business Profile reviews first, then Trustpilot and Checkatrade. American and B2B-weighted platforms such as Yelp and G2 carry limited weight for UK trades, despite Yelp’s 2026 data deal with OpenAI, because their coverage of UK tradespeople and local services is thin.
How long does it take to get recommended by ChatGPT?
Expect roughly 8 to 12 weeks for broader AI visibility to shift, with some Google Business Profile changes appearing sooner, at around 4 to 8 weeks. Both ranges are vendor-reported rather than controlled studies, so hold them loosely and measure your own mention rate.