How to Get Your Business Mentioned by ChatGPT: A Practical Guide for UK Companies

ChatGPT mentions a business when it can find clear, consistent and corroborated information about it: on the business's own website, in its search index, and in what other sources say about it. You cannot pay for a mention or submit your business anywhere. What you can do is make sure your site is crawlable, says plainly what you do and where, and that independent sources (reviews, directories, press, trade bodies) back that up.

Below we explain where ChatGPT's answers come from, then go through the steps that actually make a difference, and the ones being sold to businesses right now that do not.

Where ChatGPT gets its information

There are two routes by which your business can end up in an answer.

Training data. The underlying model learned from a large snapshot of the web taken before its cutoff date. If your business was well documented then, the model may know of you without searching. If you are new or small, it probably does not, and it may even mix you up with a similarly named company.

Live search. For questions about current or local things ("best accountant in Leicester for contractors"), ChatGPT now often searches the web, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer with links. This is the route most small businesses can realistically influence, because it depends on what is on the web today.

OpenAI publishes details of its crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot, which is used for search results, and GPTBot, which is used for training. They are separate, so you can allow one and block the other.

Step one: make sure you are not blocking it

This sounds basic, but we regularly find sites that are invisible to AI search by accident. Common causes:

• A robots.txt rule blocking all bots except Google, often added by a security plugin or a nervous developer.
• Cloudflare or hosting firewall settings that challenge or block AI crawlers by default. Cloudflare added options for this, and some accounts have them switched on.
• Key content loaded only by JavaScript after the page renders, which some crawlers do not run.
• Pages marked noindex that should not be.

Check your robots.txt at yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. If you want to appear in ChatGPT search, OAI-SearchBot must be allowed. Allowing GPTBot for training is a separate business decision; blocking it does not stop search citations.

Step two: say plainly what you do and where

AI tools summarise. If your homepage says "crafting exceptional experiences for forward thinking brands", there is nothing concrete to summarise. Compare that with "We are a family-run heating engineer covering Derby and south Derbyshire, fitting and servicing gas boilers and heat pumps since 2009." That sentence can be lifted almost word for word into an answer.

Every key page should make these facts easy to find:

• Business name, exactly as it appears elsewhere.
• What you do, in the words customers search with.
• Where you work: towns, counties, or UK-wide.
• Who you serve, and who you do not.
• Credentials that can be checked: Gas Safe number, FCA registration, Companies House number, trade body membership.

A proper about us page does a lot of this work, and it is often the page AI tools read to work out who you are.

Step three: write pages that answer real questions

ChatGPT search tends to pull from pages that directly answer the question asked. If a common question in your trade is "how long does a loft conversion take" or "do I need planning permission for a dropped kerb", a clear page answering that, with your local knowledge, is the kind of thing that gets read and cited.

Structure helps. Put the direct answer in the first paragraph, then the detail. Use descriptive headings. Add FAQ sections where questions are genuinely asked. We go deeper into this in our guide to AI search optimisation.

What does not help is publishing dozens of thin, near identical pages in the hope of catching every phrasing. That tends to hurt you in Google as well.

Step four: get mentioned on other sites

This is the part that moves the needle most, and the part that takes longest. When ChatGPT is asked for a recommendation, it looks for corroboration. A business that appears on several independent, relevant sites looks more credible than one that only describes itself.

Useful places to be mentioned, roughly in order of how achievable they are:

1. Your Google Business Profile, complete and active, with genuine reviews.
2. Review platforms relevant to your trade: Trustpilot, Checkatrade, Which? Trusted Traders, Feefo.
3. Trade body and accreditation directories, which are usually well trusted.
4. Local press, business awards, chamber of commerce listings.
5. Supplier and partner sites that list approved installers or stockists.
6. Forum threads and Reddit discussions where people genuinely recommend you. You cannot fake these, and should not try.

Consistency matters. Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere, the same principle as in local SEO.

Structured data and llms.txt

Schema markup (Organization or LocalBusiness, with your name, address, phone, opening hours and social profiles) gives machines a clean statement of the facts. It is cheap to add and helps Google too, so we include it on every build. Do not expect it to win mentions on its own.

You may have been told to add an llms.txt file. It is a proposed convention for giving AI tools a summary of your site. It does no harm, but there is little evidence that major AI search products rely on it today, and Google has said it does not use it. We would put it well below the steps above.

How to check whether ChatGPT mentions you

There is no Search Console equivalent for ChatGPT yet, so checking is manual:

• Ask the questions your customers would ask, with and without your town name, and note who gets mentioned.
• Ask directly about your business name and check the facts it gives. Wrong information usually points to an outdated or inconsistent source.
• Look in your analytics for referral traffic from chatgpt.com. ChatGPT search adds a utm_source parameter to many outbound links, which makes this easier to spot.
• Repeat monthly. Answers vary between sessions, so one check proves little.

Keep a simple log: the date, the exact question, which businesses were named and which sources were linked. After a few months you will see which sites ChatGPT keeps citing for your trade and area. Those are the places worth getting listed on, reviewed on or featured in, and that list is often more useful than the mention check itself.

What to ignore

A new industry has appeared selling AI visibility. Some of it is sensible SEO with a new label. Some is not. Be sceptical of:

• Anyone guaranteeing that ChatGPT will recommend you.
• Paid "AI directories" that claim to feed language models.
• Mass-produced articles placed on low quality sites to create mentions.
• Hidden text or prompts aimed at AI crawlers. This is spam and can damage your Google rankings.

The honest position is that being genuinely good, being clearly described and being talked about by others is what works. That is slow, but it is also what works in Google, as we explain in how Google ranking works.

Frequently asked questions

Want a second pair of eyes on your AI visibility?

We check robots.txt, crawler access, schema and on-page clarity as part of our SEO work. If you would like us to look at how your business shows up in ChatGPT and Google, get in touch.