How to get recommended by ChatGPT in the UK

To be recommended by ChatGPT for a commercial question, you need three things to be true: it can retrieve information about you, that information is unambiguous about what you do and where, and the sources it trusts for your kind of question already mention you. Everything below serves one of those three.

1. Be retrievable

ChatGPT answers commercial questions by searching. That path runs through a crawler, and the crawler reads text, not rendered layouts.

Fetch your homepage with JavaScript disabled and read the result. If your services and locations are not there as text, fix that before anything else — it is the difference between being weighed and not being in the room.

Then check robots.txt. OpenAI operates separate agents for training and for search retrieval. Blocking the training crawler is a legitimate choice with no effect on today's answers. Blocking the search crawler removes you from them. Confirm which you have done, deliberately.

2. Remove the ambiguity about where you are

UK place names are shared with American ones — Birmingham, Manchester, Boston, Richmond, Windsor, Halifax, Hamilton. We have measured this producing wrong results in practice: a US firm turning up among the cited sources for a question explicitly about a UK city.

Being unmistakable helps:

• Full postal address in text, not only in an image or a map embed.
• The towns and postcodes you actually cover, written out.
• "UK" present somewhere obvious. It reads as unnecessary to a human and does real work here.
• Consistent name, address and phone number across every listing that mentions you. Contradictory copies of your details are a reason to trust none of them.

3. Get into the sources it already trusts

This is most of the work, and it is not on your website.

When ChatGPT answers "who should I call for X in Y", it draws on sources it already trusts for that question. For UK local services that is typically some mix of directories, review platforms, local press and round-up articles. The specific set varies by trade and by town, and it is knowable: ask the question and read the sources it returns.

Then work that list in order of how often each source appears:

• Directories and listings — claim, complete, keep accurate.
• Review platforms — presence and recency both matter; a dormant profile is weak evidence.
• Local press and round-ups — a mention in a "best X in Y" article is worth more than most on-site work.
• Trade bodies and accreditations — often cited, often overlooked, and usually genuinely available to you.
• Suppliers and partners — a case study on a supplier's site is a credible third-party mention that costs a phone call.

Two cautions. First, a cited source that serves a different country is not an opportunity, however often it appears. Second, ignore anyone offering to place you in "500+ AI directories" — the sources that matter are the ones actually cited for your questions, and that is a list of a dozen, not five hundred.

4. Write pages that can be quoted

For the pages you do control, the pattern that gets quoted is unglamorous: answer the question in the first two sentences, use a heading that matches how someone would ask it, and keep each answer self-contained enough to survive being lifted out of context.

A page called "Emergency plumbing" that opens with "We have been proudly serving Leeds since 1998" gives an engine nothing to quote. One called "How much does an emergency plumber cost in Leeds?" that opens with an actual price range does.

5. Measure, then measure again

Ask the questions your customers ask. Record the answers and the sources. Change one thing. Ask again a month later.

Without a before, an after tells you nothing — and these answers drift on their own, so some of what you see next month is the engine, not you. That is exactly why single readings mislead and why we keep every answer we record.

What not to bother with

• Keyword stuffing. It was already ineffective; it is worse here, where the whole page is being read for meaning.
• Paying to be in an "AI index". No such index gates ChatGPT's recommendations.
• Guaranteed placement. Nobody controls the output. Any guarantee of a position is a guarantee about someone else's system.

Our free check asks three of these questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, records what came back, and gives you the source list to work from. About a minute, no card.