What you’ll be able to do

By the end of this, your business should have a real shot at coming up when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot something like “recommend me a plumber in Manchester” or “who does SEO in Leeds”. Not guaranteed. Nobody can guarantee that, and if someone tells you they can, walk away. But findable, properly described, and sitting in the places these tools actually look.

Findable only gets you so far if you don’t know why people find things in the first place. That’s where the ideas behind search come in, and they’re simpler than you’d think. If you want to understand how people look for a business like yours, learn the basics of SEO first. Then everything above will make a lot more sense.

That’s the whole job here. Get your business legible to a machine that’s trying to answer a question honestly.

Before you start

Right, so here’s the bit people skip and then get confused later. AI assistants don’t have a “recommend this business” button that you pay to press. There’s no advert slot inside a ChatGPT answer. If a business shows up when someone asks for a recommendation, it’s because the assistant found information about that business somewhere, trusted it enough to use it, and thought it answered the question well.

Where does that information come from? Mostly the same places it’s always come from: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, review sites, news mentions, forum threads where someone said “yeah I used them, they were great”. These tools read the web (some in real time via search, some from training data that gets refreshed periodically) and stitch together an answer. Google’s Gemini and Copilot in particular tend to lean on live search results. ChatGPT and Claude can also search the web when connected to that feature, though it depends on which version you’re using.

The upshot: you can’t buy your way in, but you can absolutely make yourself easier to find and easier to trust. Think of it less like advertising and more like being a good source. If someone asked a local mate “who’s a decent plumber round here”, you’d want your name to come up because you’re actually good, and because enough people have said so somewhere the mate (or the AI) can see it.

One more thing before you start. Review volume and recency seem to matter a lot. A business with three reviews from 2019 reads very differently to an AI than one with forty reviews, half of them from the last two months. That’s an observation rather than a published rule, but it’s how trust signals work everywhere else too, and it’s worth keeping in mind for everything that follows.

Get set up

Start with the boring stuff, because the boring stuff is the foundation.

Complete your Google Business Profile properly. Categories, services listed out, opening hours, photos, and actual posts now and then. This sounds tedious. It is tedious. It’s also one of the clearest signals AI tools and search engines both use to understand what you do and where.

Keep your name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Directories, your website footer, social profiles, all of it. Inconsistency here (Ltd on one, dropped on another, old address lingering on a directory you forgot existed) makes it harder for anything, human or AI, to be confident it’s looking at the same business.

Build a proper services page for each thing you do, and write it to answer the actual question a buyer would type or ask out loud. Not “Our Services” with three vague paragraphs. “Emergency boiler repair in Salford” with the detail a real customer needs. AI tools pull specifics when specifics exist.

Get real reviews, and reply to them.

This is where I’d point you at ReviewNudge’s review request message builder (reviewnudge.app/tools/review-request-generator/), which is one of ours, so take that as it is, but it does something genuinely useful here: free, no account needed, it writes an honest, ready-to-send message asking customers for a Google review after a job, for text, WhatsApp or email, so asking every customer the same way doesn’t depend on you remembering the wording. It won’t send anything or track who you’ve asked, that part’s still yours. If you’re a local business trying to build review volume without chasing people manually, it’s worth a look. The honest alternative is just asking every customer yourself, by text or in person, and following up. Slower, free either way, and it works if you’re disciplined about it.

If you want to go a step further, there’s hilyt (hilyt.it), also ours. It gives you a single AI-readable profile page (yours would sit at something like i.hilyt.it/yourbusiness) built with proper schema.org Organization markup, an llm.txt card, and sourced claims and FAQs, basically one clean page that states plainly what you do, who it’s for, and where you operate. It costs £1, once. The alternative is making sure your own website has clear, structured “About” and “FAQ” content that says the same things in plain English, which costs nothing but your time and is worth doing regardless.

And if you want to actually measure whether any of this is working rather than just hoping, visibilitytoai.com does a Snapshot: £89, one-off, and it puts fifteen approved buyer questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, then reports back whether you’re mentioned, and separately whether you’re cited as a source. There’s a free readiness check before you commit to that, and whatisgeo.app is free background reading if you want to understand the landscape before spending anything.

Try it yourself

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot, whichever you’ve got to hand, and try these.

I need a [your trade, e.g. plumber, accountant, web designer] in [your town or city]. Who would you recommend and why?
What do you know about [your business name] in [your town]? Give me what you know about their services, reputation, and location.
I'm comparing [your trade] businesses in [your area]. What should I look for, and can you name a few options with a short reason for each?

Run each one a couple of times, maybe in more than one tool. Note whether your business comes up unprompted, whether it comes up when you nudge it by name, and whether what it says about you is actually correct.

Check the result

Here’s where you work out if any of this is landing. A mention isn’t the same as a recommendation, so be honest with yourself about which one you’re getting.

Ask yourself: did your business appear in the first prompt, the one where you didn’t name yourself? That’s the real test. If you only show up once you’ve said your own name, the AI has heard of you but isn’t independently putting you forward, which tells you your visibility signals (reviews, directory listings, services pages) probably need work.

Check the details are right. Is the location correct? The services? If it’s confidently telling someone you do something you stopped offering two years ago, that’s a sign there’s stale information about you somewhere online that needs correcting or removing.

A good result looks like this: you appear in a “recommend me a [trade] in [place]” prompt without prompting, the details it gives are accurate, and ideally it says something specific rather than generic filler like “they’re a good option, check their website.” Specific means it’s pulled something real, probably a review, a services page, or a directory listing with actual content.

If you want a properly structured version of this test rather than doing it by hand, that’s exactly what the visibilitytoai.com Snapshot is built for, running the same fifteen questions consistently across four assistants and telling you mention versus citation separately.

If it doesn’t work

First, the privacy bit, because this matters. Never paste customer personal data, financial details, or anything commercially sensitive into a public AI chat tool to “test” your business. Testing what an AI says about you using publicly available information is fine. Feeding it your client list, invoices, or anyone’s contact details is not, and it’s not necessary for any of this anyway.

If you’ve done the setup and nothing’s shifting, a few likely culprits. Review count is probably the biggest one. If you’ve got five reviews and your nearest competitor has eighty, recency and volume alone will tip things their way even if your work is better. That’s frustrating, but it’s fixable, and it’s the single most common reason nothing changes.

Check your Google Business Profile isn’t half-finished. Missing categories, no photos, hours not set. These sound trivial and they’re not.

Check for duplicate or conflicting listings. An old business name, a wrong address on one directory, a defunct phone number somewhere. Confusing signals get ignored rather than trusted.

And be patient. These tools don’t refresh instantly. Changes you make today might not show up in an answer for weeks, sometimes longer, depending on how and when the assistant last searched or was updated. If genuinely nothing has moved after a couple of months of real effort (not just wishing it would), it’s worth an actual audit rather than guessing, which is where a proper Snapshot or readiness check earns its money.

Questions people ask

No. AI assistants don't have a "recommend this business" button that you pay to press, and there's no advert slot inside a ChatGPT answer. If someone tells you they can guarantee it, walk away.

How do I test whether AI recommends my local business?

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot and ask for a recommendation for your trade in your town, then ask what it knows about your business by name. Run each a couple of times and note whether you come up unprompted and whether the details are correct.

What does a good result look like when checking AI answers?

You appear in a "recommend me a [trade] in [place]" prompt without naming yourself, the details it gives are accurate, and it says something specific rather than generic filler. Specific means it's pulled something real, like a review, a services page or a directory listing.

Why isn't my business showing up in AI answers?

Review count is usually the biggest culprit, followed by a half-finished Google Business Profile and duplicate or conflicting listings. These tools also don't refresh instantly, so changes might not show up in an answer for weeks.

Is it safe to paste business information into AI chat tools?

Testing what an AI says about you using publicly available information is fine. Never paste customer personal data, financial details or anything commercially sensitive into a public AI chat tool, and it isn't necessary for any of this anyway.

Keep exploring

If you want to understand the difference between being mentioned and being properly cited as a source, have a look at “How to get AI to cite me”. And if you’re getting mentioned but the tone or description feels off, wrong personality, wrong emphasis, “How to get AI to sound like my brand” covers that side of things.

Sources and review notes

Review date: 15 September 2026 — every source above was opened and checked against the text on that date.

Disclosure: ReviewNudge, hilyt and visibilitytoai are our products — this site is made by the same studio, Adapt Progress Evolve. We have tried to compare fairly, and the alternatives named are real and worth a look.