Ask ChatGPT for a plumber in your town and it will name a few. If yours is not one of them, nothing was decided against you. The assistant simply did not find enough about you to say your name with confidence.
Most guides on this subject are written by agencies and list tactics. This one sticks to what the assistants themselves say they do, and what you can check for yourself.
What an assistant actually does
When you ask for a local service, ChatGPT usually runs a web search, reads a handful of pages, and composes an answer from them. The firms it names are the ones it could find, read and trust in that moment. That is why the same question can give different names on different days: the sources it happened to read changed.
Nobody can pay for a place in that answer, and there is no form to submit. OpenAI's ChatGPT search help page describes results drawn from the web, not a listing you can buy.
Let the crawler in
The first condition is technical and often missed. OpenAI's search crawler is called OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI's crawler documentation says a site must allow it to be eligible to appear in ChatGPT search. Some security settings and hosting defaults block it without anyone noticing. Check your site's robots.txt, or ask whoever looks after the site to.
The listings assistants read
Assistants lean on the same business databases as maps and search engines. Three matter in the UK: your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and Apple Business Connect for Apple Maps and Siri.
Fill each one completely, and make the details identical everywhere: the same business name, address, phone number and services. Mixed details read as two different businesses, and the assistant trusts neither.
Say plainly what you do and where
On your own site, the first lines of the homepage should state in plain words what you do, who for, where, and what it costs if you can say. Assistants quote declarative sentences. "Emergency plumber covering Bristol and Bath, 24-hour callouts" is quotable. A slogan is not.
Structured data helps too. A LocalBusiness block with your address and service area, and a plain FAQ answering the questions customers actually ask, give the assistant facts in a form it reads directly.
Mentions elsewhere count more than pages
The strongest signal is not on your site at all. Reviews that name the service and the town, a complete directory entry, a mention in local news, a listing on a trade body's site: these are what an assistant finds when it searches, and they are what it cites. In our own checks of small business websites, how good a site was on its own pages did not predict whether assistants knew the business; what they found elsewhere mattered more.
What we check, every fortnight
Every fortnight we check how you show on Google and whether AI assistants name you. We choose the searches and AI questions that matter for you. Every review opens with how you're doing against your own goals: whether AI assistants name you, your Google searches, visitors from your market and enquiries. We fix the technical things ourselves and tell you, including crawler access and structured data.
We cannot make an assistant recommend anyone, and we do not promise to. What we can do is make sure that when it looks, it finds you, reads you correctly, and sees that other people vouch for you.
We check what AI says about you and fix what's in the way: goaimysite.com/one-site.
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