A woman in Bridge of Allan wakes up to a leaking boiler. Ten years ago she reached for the Yellow Pages. Two years ago, Google. This morning she opens ChatGPT and types: emergency plumber near Stirling, someone who can come today.
She gets three names. Not ten blue links. Three.
If your business is not one of them, you never got the chance to compete. This post walks through how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and the other AI assistants, starting with a ten-minute test you can run before you change a single thing.
This is already happening to your enquiries
YouGov’s 2026 UK brand tracking puts ChatGPT well ahead of the other AI assistants for preference, with roughly a third of AI users naming it as their favourite and Gemini gaining ground fastest. Google now answers plenty of searches at the top of the page without sending anyone to a website at all.
For a local business that changes one thing: being findable is no longer the same as being recommended. The AI reads what exists about you, decides whether you fit the question, and names two or three companies. There is no page two.
The good news is that nothing here requires new technology. What earns a recommendation is clarity and corroboration, and both are fixable.
Test it yourself in ten minutes
Before you change anything, find out where you stand. Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask it the way a customer would:
- best [your trade] in [your town]
- who should I call for [specific job] near [your town]
- I need [service] this week in [your town], who do you recommend
- is [your business name] any good
Note three things. Did it name you? If not, who did it name? And when you asked about your own business by name, was what it said accurate?
That last one catches more problems than owners expect. Wrong opening hours. An old phone number. A service you dropped two years ago. The AI is repeating what it found, and it found it somewhere you can go and fix.
What actually decides whether you get named
Four things do most of the work here. None of them are secret, and none of them need a developer on retainer.
Your Google Business Profile does the heavy lifting
It is still the strongest signal about who you are and where you work. Fill in every field. Get the categories right. List services individually rather than lumping them under “general building”. Add photos of real jobs. Keep the hours accurate, including bank holidays. This is core local SEO work, and it is the foundation the AI recommendation sits on.
Reviews are the evidence
An AI weighs whether other people back up what you claim. Volume matters, recency matters more, and detail matters most. A review that says “fixed our leak the same day, quoted before starting” tells the model what you are good at. “Great service, 5 stars” tells it nothing. Ask customers to mention the specific job you did. One of our clients went after this properly and lifted their Google reviews by 450%, and that kind of detailed, recent proof is exactly what an AI leans on when it decides who to name.
Service pages that answer the actual question
Write one page per service, per area you cover. Use the words customers use, not trade terms. Put your price range, your response time and your patch in plain text on the page. Vague pages get skipped because the model cannot tell whether you fit. A clear, conversion-focused service page does double duty: it convinces the human and it feeds the machine.
Someone other than you has to say it
Self-description alone rarely wins a recommendation. Trade directories, supplier listings, local press, sponsorship pages, Facebook groups, Reddit threads about your town. These are where the AI checks your story against the world. Make sure your name, address and phone number match everywhere. A second address from an old office quietly undermines you.
One more thing, easy to miss: do not lock the door. Some websites block AI crawlers by default, often without the owner knowing. Contact details buried in an image cannot be read either. Ask whoever built your site to confirm the AI assistants are allowed in and your key details are real text on the page, not a graphic.
What will not work
Stuffing your pages with “AI-optimised plumber Stirling” does nothing except make the copy unreadable. Buying reviews is worse than having none, because inconsistency is exactly what these systems are checking for.
And be careful with agencies selling brand-new “AI visibility” packages at a premium. Look closely and most of it is the same work: accurate listings, real reviews, clear pages, genuine mentions elsewhere. Good SEO was always this. The rules have not changed as much as the invoices suggest.
Five things to do this week
- Run the four prompts above and write down what the AI says about you.
- Log into your Google Business Profile and complete every empty field.
- Ask your last five happy customers for a review that names the job.
- Rewrite one service page so it states clearly what you do, where, and roughly what it costs.
- Check that your name, address and phone number match on every directory you can find.
That is an afternoon of work. It will do more for your enquiries next quarter than any redesign.
Where this goes next
Customers are getting used to asking a question and receiving an answer, not a list. The businesses that get named will be the ones a machine can describe confidently: clear about what they do, where they work, and backed up by people who are not them.
Get the fundamentals right and you do not have to chase each AI tool separately. The same clean profile, honest reviews and plain-spoken pages that get you named in ChatGPT get you named in Gemini and in Google’s own AI answers too.
FAQs
How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?
There is no submission form and no paid placement. ChatGPT names businesses it can describe confidently from trusted sources, so the route is a complete Google Business Profile, consistent name, address and phone number everywhere, detailed recent reviews, and clear service pages in plain text. Get those lined up and give it a couple of months. Businesses with strong local SEO tend to appear first.
Can I pay to get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
No. Nobody can sell you guaranteed placement in a ChatGPT recommendation, and anyone claiming otherwise is worth avoiding. The AI decides who to name based on what it can find and verify about you across the web. What you can pay for is the underlying work: accurate listings, a strong profile, real reviews and clear pages. That is ordinary SEO, not a magic AI package.
Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitors and not me?
Usually because their information is clearer and more consistent than yours. If a competitor has a complete Google Business Profile, detailed recent reviews and service pages that state exactly what they do and where, the AI can describe them with confidence. If your details conflict across sites, or your pages are vague, it hedges and picks someone easier to trust. Fix the clarity and the gap closes.
How do I check what ChatGPT says about my business?
Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask as a customer would: “best [your trade] in [your town]”, or “is [your business name] any good”. Note whether it names you, who it names instead, and whether the details it gives are correct. Wrong hours, an old phone number or a dropped service all point to information you can go and fix at the source.
Is getting recommended by ChatGPT different from normal SEO?
It builds on the same foundations rather than replacing them. A strong Google Business Profile, consistent citations, genuine reviews and clear content help you in Google and in AI answers alike. The emphasis shifts slightly towards plain, direct writing and details a machine can read without guessing, but there is no separate secret. Do local SEO well and you cover both at once.
Ready to be the business AI recommends?
If you would rather someone handled it, that is what we do. We are based in Stirling and we build websites designed to rank and built to convert, for trades and service businesses across Scotland and the UK. Book a free discovery call and we will run these tests on your business and tell you exactly what is holding you back.