How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT

Why this is worth ten minutes of your attention

A growing share of people no longer search, scroll and click. They ask a question and get one answer with two or three businesses named in it. There is no position two in that format — either you are named or you are invisible.

For most Mansfield businesses this is still a small share of enquiries, and we would not tell you to move your budget to it this year. But it is cheap to do alongside SEO, the work overlaps heavily with things worth doing anyway, and almost nobody local is doing it. That combination does not last.

What actually influences it

Related to SEO, but the emphasis is different in ways that matter:

• Direct answers. AI engines lift passages. A page that answers the question in its first two sentences gets quoted; one that warms up for three paragraphs does not.
• Specific numbers. "From £250, typically four to six weeks" is citable. "Competitive pricing, fast turnaround" is not. This is the single biggest practical difference from traditional SEO copywriting.
• Consistency. Your name, address, phone and description identical everywhere. Ambiguity about who you are is the fastest route to being left out of an answer.
• Structured data. Schema markup removes guesswork about what you are, where you are and what you sell.
• Third-party corroboration. Being described the same way on directories, trade bodies and local press makes you a safer thing to recommend.
• Crawler access. If your robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, you have opted out entirely.

Practical steps, in order

• Check your robots.txt is not blocking AI crawlers. Many sites block them by accident, often via a security plugin default.
• Rewrite your key pages so the answer comes first. Put the price, the timescale and the area covered in the opening lines.
• Add FAQ sections using the exact phrasing people use, not the phrasing your industry uses.
• Publish real numbers. Prices, timescales, coverage areas, years trading, review counts.
• Get your schema markup right — LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage at minimum.
• Consider an llms.txt file: a plain-Markdown index of your site at the root, which several AI crawlers now look for.
• Fix inconsistent listings. Old addresses and disconnected phone numbers on directories actively confuse entity resolution.

How to check where you stand

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews the questions your customers would ask. "Who is the best plumber in Mansfield?" "Recommend an accountant in Sutton-in-Ashfield." Write down who gets named.

Do it again monthly. The answers vary between sessions, so a single check tells you little, but the trend over a few months is real and measurable.

Then look at the businesses that do get named and work out why. It is rarely that they are the best. It is usually that their information is the clearest and most consistently corroborated.