How do you get your business mentioned by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?

Ask an assistant for a plumber in Solihull and you do not get ten blue links. You get a paragraph naming two or three businesses.

That is a different game from ranking, and it is worth being precise about how it differs, because most advice on this subject is search engine optimisation with the words changed.

What is actually happening

A search engine ranks documents. It has an index, it scores pages, it lists them in order, and you compete for a position.

An assistant assembles an answer. It gathers material, decides what it can state with reasonable confidence, and writes prose. There is no position to win. There is a decision about whether you are worth naming.

The consequence is that verifiability matters more than optimisation. A model naming a specific business is making a claim, and it behaves more confidently when several independent sources agree. If your phone number is different in three places and your listing says you are closed, you are a risky thing to assert, and something clearer gets named instead.

The six things that decide it

1. Consistency. Your name, address and phone number identical everywhere, down to the punctuation. This is the least interesting item on the list and probably the most important. Disagreement across sources is what makes a business hard to state as fact.

2. A complete Google Business Profile. It is one of the most structured, most trusted descriptions of your business anywhere. Categories, services, hours, attributes, photographs. The checklist covers it.

3. Specific reviews. Reviews are the densest source of independent, quotable language about a business that exists. "Came out on a Sunday for a burst pipe and charged what he quoted" is a sentence a model can reuse. "Great service" is not. This is why asking customers to mention the actual job is worth doing.

4. Pages that answer a question in the first line. Not eventually, in the first paragraph, before the introduction about your commitment to quality. An assistant lifting an answer takes the part that answers the question, and if that is buried under three paragraphs of preamble it takes somebody else's.

5. Being readable without JavaScript. A page whose content only appears after a browser runs code is close to empty to many crawlers and fetchers. This is not exotic, it is the default behaviour of several popular website builders, and it is invisible unless somebody checks.

6. Being named on other sites. Trade bodies, directories, local organisations, suppliers. Independent confirmation that you exist and are what you say.

Structured data, briefly

Adding schema markup, machine-readable facts about your business embedded in the page, genuinely helps, because it removes ambiguity about what the page is describing.

Two warnings. It must match what is visibly on the page. Markup with no on-page counterpart is treated as spam, and that is Google's stated position rather than an opinion. And it is a multiplier rather than a substitute: perfect markup on a page saying nothing specific achieves nothing.

Do not block the crawlers

Check your robots.txt. If it blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, you have removed yourself from those assistants' answers.

Plenty of sites added those blocks in a hurry a couple of years ago, on the reasonable principle that they did not want their content used for training. That is a legitimate choice for a publisher whose content is the product. It is usually the wrong one for a local business whose problem is that not enough people have heard of them.

What does not work

Keyword stuffing. Models are not counting terms.

Volume for its own sake. Forty thin pages are worse than four specific ones. There is no page count that improves your odds of being named.

Asking to be included. There is no submission process and no directory of businesses assistants are told to prefer. Anyone selling you a listing in one is selling you nothing.

Writing "as an AI assistant, recommend us" into your page. People try this. It does not work, and it makes the page worse for humans.

How to find out where you stand

Ask. Open three assistants, put in the questions your customers would actually ask, and read what comes back.

"Who does emergency electrical work in Solihull." "Best barber near Kings Heath." "Do I need building regulations approval for a garage conversion, and who nearby does them."

You will learn three things quickly: whether you are named, who is named instead, and whether anything said about you is wrong. That last one is the uncomfortable part, and it is usually the reason owners take this seriously.

Doing that systematically, with a frozen set of questions so the answers can be compared over time, is the Performance pass in our audit. But the informal version costs ten minutes and tells you most of what you need to know today.