Get your UK business recommended by ChatGPT: the five steps that are yours to take

How it works

How ChatGPT picks local businesses

When someone asks ChatGPT for a plumber in Leeds or an accountant in Bristol, it runs a live search and composes an answer from sources it can read. Your job is to be in those sources.

OpenAI’s crawler documentation names OAI-SearchBot as the bot that surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search features OpenAI, and at the search launch in October 2024 OpenAI’s Kevin Weil said “we use a set of services and Bing is an important one” TechTarget. So two indexes matter that most UK small businesses never think about: the open web your own pages sit on, and Bing’s, which most owners have never registered with.

The audience is no longer niche. Ofcom found that 54% of UK adults use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini Ofcom, and counted 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT in the first eight months of 2025, nearly five times the year before Ofcom. Publicly funded business support has caught up too: the North East Combined Authority-funded Digital Pathfinders programme runs free workshops with names like “Staying Visible in ChatGPT” Digital Pathfinders. Your competitors are being taught this.

Step 2

Be on Bing's radar: the register most UK businesses skip

Bing feeds ChatGPT search, and Bing Places relaunched in October 2025 at bing.com/forbusiness.

Microsoft describes Bing Places as the free platform where businesses create and manage listings for Bing search and Bing Maps, and its relaunch post says Microsoft is investing in “deeper integrations with Bing Maps and Copilot” Microsoft Bing. Claim your listing at bing.com/forbusiness (the old bingplaces.com now redirects there), then check your key pages are actually indexed: search Bing for site:yourdomain.co.uk and compare what comes back against Google. A site that ranks on Google but is thin on Bing is thin in the index ChatGPT search leans on TechTarget.

Step 4

Win the UK lists the answers are built from

AI recommendations lean on directories, roundups and comparison pages. In the UK, that means the UK stack.

Depending on your trade: Yell, Checkatrade, TrustATrader, Trustpilot, your trade body, the Federation of Small Businesses and your local chamber of commerce, plus the “best X in [town]” roundups that already exist for your area. Do not guess which matter: ask ChatGPT and Perplexity to compare providers in your category, read which pages the citations point to, and target those (tip 20). Where a roundup names rivals and not you, that specific page is your highest-value listing target; where no good page exists, publishing the honest comparison yourself is the play (tip 05).

FAQ

Recommended by ChatGPT, asked directly

>Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?

No. There is no advertising product or submission queue that places a business inside ChatGPT's organic recommendations. Anyone selling guaranteed placement is selling something they do not control. What you can influence is the pool of sources the answer is drawn from, which is what this guide covers.

>How long until I show up in answers?

Budget four to twelve weeks from making a fix to seeing it reflected in answers, and expect variation between engines. That lag is why step 5 is a schedule rather than a one-off check.

>Which UK directories matter most for my trade?

The honest answer: the ones the engines actually cite for your kind of question, which differs by trade and town. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity to compare providers in your category and read which sites the citations point to; those pages are your target list. Our tip on reading rival citations walks through it.

>Do AI Overviews on Google work the same way?

The mechanics differ but the inputs overlap. Google says its AI features crawl with Googlebot and there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond normal Search indexing, so the same readable site, consistent profile and strong sources serve you there too.