How can a UK business get recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?

Can you pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?

No. There is no listing to buy and no form to fill in. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google do not publish rules for which businesses their assistants recommend, so every piece of advice on this subject, including ours, is informed practice rather than official guidance.

What is known is that these assistants build their answers from what they can read on the open web and what they have learned from it. The work is making sure that what they read about your business is accessible, clear, specific and consistent.

What are the six steps?

Work through them in order. The early steps are small and technical; the later ones take months and matter more.

1. Let the AI crawlers in. Crawlers are the programs that read websites for these tools. Check your robots.txt file, which tells crawlers what they may read, allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, and that your pages show their text without needing JavaScript to run.
2. State who you are, in full, everywhere. Use your full business name, your legal company name, your address and what you do, the same way on your website, Companies House, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories. If your name is shared with another firm, say plainly which one you are.
3. Add structured data. This is machine-readable code, usually called schema or JSON-LD, that tells an assistant your page is about a business, a person, a service or a set of questions. It does not win recommendations alone, but it removes guesswork.
4. Answer the questions buyers actually ask. Give each important question its own page or heading, phrased the way a buyer would type it, with a direct two or three sentence answer straight underneath. An assistant can quote that. It cannot quote a page of general marketing copy.
5. Put named people behind the content. Articles and service pages attributed to a real person, with a profile page and a LinkedIn link, are easier to trust than anonymous brand copy.
6. Be described by others. Reviews, press coverage, industry directories, podcast appearances and partner pages that describe you accurately give an assistant independent confirmation of what your own site says. This is the slowest step and usually the one that makes the difference.

What does not work?

Shortcuts that sell one technical detail as the whole answer. An llms.txt file, a schema plug-in or a burst of keyword-stuffed articles will not, on their own, get a business named. Neither will copying a competitor's pages, because an assistant has no reason to name the copy.

Be wary of anyone who guarantees a placement in a named assistant by a named date. Nobody controls those answers, so the guarantee cannot be honest.

How do you check whether it is working?

Ask the assistants yourself. Write down five to ten questions a buyer would ask before hiring a business like yours, ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google, and record whether your business is named in the answer text, not just listed as a link. Repeat monthly.

Answers vary from one run to the next and from one assistant to another, so look at the pattern over several months rather than any single answer. Technical changes are usually picked up within weeks; movement in the answers themselves typically takes one to three months.

How does Momentum Inspire help?

Momentum Inspire is a commercial growth consultancy based at 66 Paul Street, London, working with UK SMEs and scale-ups. Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, the practice of being named in the answers AI assistants give, is one of our six services, and every engagement is led by our co-founders Oliver Woodhead and Warren Day.

We start by scoring your website against our AEO Maturity Score, a six-pillar method published in full on this site, covering access and crawlability, structured data, content extractability, entity clarity, authority and trust, and measurement and freshness. Our own previous website scored 15 out of 100, which we call Invisible, and this site was rebuilt against every pillar. We then carry out the fixes, restructure content so assistants can quote it, and report monthly on what each assistant actually says about you.