To get recommended by ChatGPT, make your business easy to identify, easy to trust and easy to quote. That means clear pages that answer questions directly, consistent details across the web, real reviews and mentions elsewhere, and a site that search crawlers can read. Nobody can pay for a guaranteed mention.
Ask ChatGPT for “a web designer in Leeds” and it names a handful of businesses. Ask again tomorrow and a few are different. Those names are getting enquiries you never saw, and you cannot see the leaderboard.
No one outside the AI companies controls who gets named. The same signals do keep appearing among businesses that are, though, and most are fixable this month.
How do ChatGPT and AI Overviews decide who to recommend?
They draw on several sources at once: what the model learned in training, live web results where the tool searches, and what other sites say about you. ChatGPT’s search feature uses its own crawler, which OpenAI calls OAI-SearchBot, and site owners can allow or block it in robots.txt. Google’s AI Overviews pull from pages already eligible to appear in Google Search.
Google has said there is no special markup or secret file for AI Overviews. A page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, and then the usual quality signals apply. That is useful news, because it means ordinary good SEO is the foundation.
How to get recommended by ChatGPT: what actually works
It helps to see this as a lunch hour job rather than a campaign. You are cleaning up how clearly your business reads to someone who has never met you, whether that someone is a person or a model. These five fixes cost far more in attention than in money.
Write pages that answer the question first
If someone asks how long a boiler service takes, the page should say “about an hour” in its opening lines and then go deeper. Models lift clear, self-contained passages. Rambling introductions get skipped.
Do this for your most common question first. If you are a roofer, that might be the cost of replacing a flat roof. Give the typical price range, say what changes it, and say where you work. A page like that is useful to a reader and easy for a model to quote.
Make it obvious who you are
State who you are, what you do and where, in plain words, on your homepage and about page. Use the same business name, description, address and phone number everywhere you appear. Inconsistency makes you harder to identify and easier to ignore.
Add structured data
Schema markup labels your business name, services, reviews and areas served in a form machines read easily. It will not make a weak page win, but it removes guesswork. We build it into every site.
Earn mentions beyond your own site
Local press, trade bodies, partner pages, podcasts and genuine reviews all count. This is old-fashioned reputation building, and it matters more than any tweak to your own pages.
Show real expertise
A page by a named person with real experience beats a generic one. Add author names, examples and original thinking. Content that repeats common knowledge gives a model no reason to cite you rather than the other forty pages that say the same thing.
If this vocabulary is new, our explainer on what generative engine optimisation is sets out the terms and separates substance from hype.
Think about reviews and third-party pages here too. When a model describes a Leeds accountant, it tends to echo how other pages describe that firm: the services listed, the areas named, the praise customers repeat. A profile on Google, a mention on a trade association page and a handful of detailed reviews give it more to work with than a polished homepage alone. Ask happy customers to say what you did and where, in their own words. Specific reviews quote better than “great service”.
Do the technical basics still matter for AI search?
Yes, more than people expect. If a page is blocked, slow or buried, nothing reads it. Check that search engines can crawl and index your site, that key content is real text rather than locked in images, and that you have not blocked AI crawlers by accident through a robots.txt copied from a template.
Our technical SEO checklist walks through each check in fix-first order. Do that before you spend a penny on anything labelled AI.
Keep your expectations realistic. Models rarely cite a brand-new site. Authority builds from consistent signals over time, so a site live for three weeks should not expect names in the answers. Treat the first three months as groundwork, and test against a small panel of questions so you can see movement rather than guess at it.
How do you check whether it is working?
Test it. Write ten questions your customers would ask, such as “who is the best roofer near Roundhay”. Put them into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google in a fresh session and note who is named. Repeat monthly. It is imperfect, because answers shift between sessions, but trends show.
Also watch your analytics for referrals from AI tools. They are small today. They are unlikely to stay small.
Does AI SEO replace normal SEO?
No. Traditional search still sends most clicks today, and the foundations overlap heavily. Think of this as a layer on top: clearer answers, sharper business information and a monitoring habit. Our AI search visibility service and SEO work are usually delivered together.
Be careful who you hire for it. Because the field is new, it attracts bold promises. Our list of SEO agency red flags includes the guarantee that no honest supplier can give, and it applies to AI visibility just as much, because the field attracts bold promises. For budgeting, what an SEO agency costs gives typical UK ranges, and if you want AI doing work inside your business too, see how to choose an AI company in Leeds.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
Not in the way you pay for search ads. Anyone selling guaranteed placement is selling something they cannot deliver.
Will AI kill my website traffic?
It will change it. Some quick-answer clicks will vanish, particularly for simple factual searches. Visitors who do arrive tend to be better informed and further along, which can suit a service business well.
Is this a fad?
Doubtful. Customer habits move slowly, then suddenly. Being ready costs little, because the work overlaps with what you should be doing anyway.
Should I block AI crawlers?
Only if you have a reason to. Blocking the crawlers that power search features means you cannot be cited by them. Some publishers block training crawlers for licensing reasons, which is a separate choice, and robots.txt lets you treat them differently.
Do I need a separate page for AI tools?
No. Write normal pages for people and make them clear. A hidden page for robots is exactly what search engines have always disliked.
Which tool should I test first?
Start with ChatGPT and Google, since most of your customers will ask there. Add Gemini and Perplexity once you have a baseline.
How long until I appear?
Impossible to promise. Changes to your own site can be picked up within weeks. Reputation signals build over months. Slow, and worth it.
Curious how visible you are today? Ask us for an AI visibility check and we will run your customers’ questions through the major tools and show you exactly what comes back.
