How to get recommended by ChatGPT as a local business

There is no form that puts your business into ChatGPT and no way to pay for a recommendation in its answers: OpenAI publishes no selection criteria and offers no submission route, and its ads appear beneath the answer, not inside it. To get recommended by ChatGPT as a local business, you make yourself easy to find and easy to check in the places it reads.

That means four things: let its search crawler into your website, make that website the clearest source of facts about you, be present on the UK sites that carry your reviews, and keep recent, specific reviews coming. None of it guarantees a mention. It makes it easier for ChatGPT to include you.

What happened when ChatGPT named your competitor

When a customer asks ChatGPT for a local business, it usually searches the web, reads what it finds, and writes an answer naming a few businesses. Your competitor was named because ChatGPT found enough about them, in the right place, to answer that question with confidence.

Location shapes the answer. OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search says ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on the person's IP address, that sharing a precise location is off by default, and that answers improve when the person names a city, neighbourhood, or postcode. So a customer in your town and one ten miles away can get different names for the same question.

The habit is now common in the UK. Ofcom's Adults' Media Use and Attitudes 2026 report, published on 2 April 2026 from a survey of 7,533 UK adults in autumn 2025, found 54% use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini, up from 31% in Ofcom's previous survey, as ISPreview reported. It does not measure how many use them to find a local business.

Can you pay or submit your business to ChatGPT?

Not into the answer. OpenAI publishes no criteria for which local businesses ChatGPT names, and it has no submission form. It does sell ads: Adtrak, a UK agency, reports that they went live in the UK in June 2026 and appear beneath the answer without changing it. An ad is not a recommendation.

Be wary of anyone selling a "ChatGPT listing" or guaranteed AI placement. At best they are selling ordinary work, such as website fixes, directory listings, and review requests, under a new name. Judge it as that work, at that price.

Four things you can do to get recommended by ChatGPT

OpenAI has published enough about how ChatGPT search finds pages to set out four steps. They run from the one most in your control to the one least in it.

Step 1: let ChatGPT's search crawler read your website

OpenAI's crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is the crawler used to surface websites in ChatGPT search. A site that blocks it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it may still appear as a plain navigational link. Changes to robots.txt, the file that tells crawlers what they may read, take about 24 hours to reach OpenAI's systems.

To check, open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt in a browser. You are looking for a block that names OAI-SearchBot with Disallow: /, or a User-agent: * block that disallows everything. If you want to be explicit, add:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

GPTBot, which gathers training data, is a separate crawler in the same documentation, so you can block training and still allow search. Robots.txt is not the only gate: security plugins, firewalls, and some hosting settings block AI crawlers on their own. Ask whoever runs your website to confirm nothing does.

Step 2: make your website the clearest source about you

Your website is the one source about you that you control completely. Write it so a crawler can lift a correct sentence from it.

• One page per service you want to be found for, saying what you do and for whom.
• The towns and postcodes you cover, in text, not only on a map image.
• Opening hours, phone number, and address, matching your Google Business Profile exactly.
• Prices or price ranges where you can give them, and what affects them.

Take a hypothetical plumbing firm in Leeds. A page that says it repairs boilers across Leeds, Bradford, and Wakefield, Monday to Saturday, with a fixed call-out fee, answers the question a customer asks ChatGPT. A home page that says "quality service you can trust" answers nothing.

Step 3: be present where ChatGPT may read about you in the UK

Most guides on this subject are American and tell you to work on Yelp. Search Engine Land reported in July 2026 that Yelp is licensing its reviews, ratings, photos, and business information to OpenAI for ChatGPT's local answers, covering about 330 million reviews. The deal is non-exclusive, and OpenAI controls how the content appears. None of the coverage we read says whether it reaches UK businesses. Look up your business and three rivals on Yelp before spending time there: if they hold few reviews, it is not the place to start.

For a UK business, these are the places to check first:

An agency study by Seer Interactive of 800,000 AI responses, which Trustpilot has publicised, found Trustpilot was the most frequently cited review website across 1,926 brands. It studied brands rather than local firms and does not say it covered the UK, so treat it as a pointer only. On Checkatrade, Insight DIY reported on 20 April 2026 that it had launched an app inside ChatGPT. A user describes a job and gets a shortlist of local vetted tradespeople or, for simpler jobs, a fixed price. Checkatrade says its 50,000+ trade businesses pass up to 12 checks.

For the two other listings, see whether Bing Places for Business is worth it in the UK and how to get your business on Apple Maps and Siri. Which sources ChatGPT reads, and whether that includes Google reviews, is the next article: does ChatGPT use Google reviews.

Step 4: keep recent, specific reviews coming

In one study, businesses with few reviews were rarely named. PPC Land reported an 8ight study finding ChatGPT named only 3.4% of tested local firms with under 25 Google reviews. It is a vendor study of trades in the US and the Toronto area, asked through ChatGPT's developer connection rather than the app, and it shows a correlation, not a rule: busier businesses have more of everything.

Ask every customer, steadily, on the sites that matter in your sector, and never offer anything in return. The most useful reviews name the service and the place, because those are the words a customer's question contains.

What can an agency selling GEO actually do?

GEO, generative engine optimisation, means work aimed at being cited by AI assistants. AEO, answer engine optimisation, means writing content so it can be given as a direct answer. Both are new names for mostly familiar work.

Google's guide to its generative AI features says site owners can ignore tactics such as "chunking" content, creating AI text files like llms.txt, or pursuing inauthentic mentions. OpenAI documents no special file either; its crawler documentation deals with robots.txt. A useful agency does the four steps above well. Be cautious of guarantees, monthly fees for "AI listings", and paid mentions. Google's own AI answers are covered in how to show up in Google AI Overviews.

How do you check whether ChatGPT recommends you?

Ask the questions your customers ask, with your town in them, several times over several days, and count how often you and each rival are named. One test proves nothing, because answers can change from one run to the next and from one place to another.

The full method, with the questions to use and how to record them, is in how to check if ChatGPT recommends my business.

Where reviews fit

Studies keep finding that businesses named by AI assistants have more reviews than those left out. That is a correlation, but the mechanism behind it is plain: reviews are where customers describe you in their own words, and those words are what an assistant matches against a question. A review that says a boiler was fixed in Headingley on a Sunday answers a question about weekend boiler repairs in Leeds.

Our local market reports show where your review count, rating, and share of positive reviews sit against your competitors in a category and town, and what customers praise and complain about across the market. They contain no ChatGPT or AI visibility data, and they do not explain why an assistant names one business over another.

What to do this week

1. Open your robots.txt and confirm OAI-SearchBot is not blocked. Ask your web developer whether a firewall or plugin blocks AI crawlers.
2. Ask ChatGPT three questions a customer would ask, with your town in each, three times each in a new chat. Note who is named and which sources are cited.
3. Check each service page states the area you cover, your hours, and, where you can, your prices.
4. Claim or update the listings that apply to you: Trustpilot, Checkatrade if you are a trade, Bing Places, Apple Business, and your sector's directory.
5. Ask every customer this week for a review on Google or the site your sector uses.
6. Decline anyone who offers a paid ChatGPT listing.

If you get recommended by ChatGPT after this, record which questions named you, so you can see whether it holds.