When Someone Asks an Assistant Who to Hire, Is It You?
More buyers now start with an assistant instead of a search box, and it names two or three firms rather than ten blue links. We find out what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot currently say about your business, then fix the reasons you are not being named. Manchester based, working across the UK.
Four Reasons an Assistant Names Someone Else
Ranking on Google and being named by an assistant are different problems. A page can sit on the first page of search and still never be quoted, usually for one of these four reasons.
Being retrievable at all
An assistant can only cite a page it can fetch, parse and quote. We fix the things that quietly prevent that — blocked crawlers, content that only exists after a script runs, pages with no clear answer to quote.
Answers, not brochures
Assistants quote the sentence that answers the question. We rewrite your pages so the answer comes first and the supporting detail follows, which is also how a buyer in a hurry reads.
Facts a machine can read
Schema markup that states plainly what you sell, where you work and how to contact you, so an assistant does not have to infer it from your homepage and get it wrong.
Turning up in the sources they trust
Assistants lean on a small set of directories, industry bodies and reference sites. We get your details onto the ones that matter for your sector, and make sure they agree with each other.
Where We Get You Ranked and Cited
Each assistant retrieves and cites sources differently. We optimise for all of them at once, because a buyer asking for a recommendation rarely tells you which one they used.
ChatGPT search
Cites pages it can retrieve and quote directly. Answer-first content and clean structure win the citation.
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
Draws on the same index as classic search, so technical health and schema still decide whether you appear.
Perplexity
Shows its sources openly. Pages that answer one question completely get cited and clicked.
Microsoft Copilot and Bing
Draws on the Bing index, which many UK businesses never verify in Bing Webmaster Tools, and reaches business users through Office. Clearly structured, factual pages with the claim and the evidence close together do best.
Knowledge graphs and directories
Consistent business facts across the sources assistants trust, so your name, services and location never conflict.
How each assistant weighs sources is not published, so parts of this are informed inference from testing rather than documented behaviour. We test your visibility with real prompts every month and report what actually changed.
Which Crawler Controls What, and What Happens If You Block It
Each assistant company runs more than one crawler, and they do different jobs. Blocking the one that trains a model is a reasonable choice; blocking the one that decides whether you can be cited is usually an accident. This is what each company documents.
| Crawler | What it is for | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI’s crawler for surfacing pages in ChatGPT search. | Your pages cannot be shown or cited in ChatGPT search results. |
| GPTBot | OpenAI’s crawler for collecting training data. OpenAI treats it as independent of OAI-SearchBot. | Your content is excluded from training. It does not stop ChatGPT search citing you, if OAI-SearchBot is allowed. |
| Googlebot | Google Search’s crawler. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need nothing extra: a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. | You drop out of Google Search, and with it AI Overviews and AI Mode. |
| Google-Extended | A control for whether content helps train and ground Google’s other AI products, not a separate crawler for Search. | No effect on appearing in Google Search or its AI Overviews. |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity’s search crawler, which Perplexity says follows robots.txt. | Perplexity cannot index your pages to cite them. Changes can take up to a day to apply. |
It is often the firewall, not robots.txt
Bot protection on a hosting platform or content delivery network can turn an assistant’s crawler away before robots.txt is ever read. Perplexity’s own crawler documentation tells site owners they may need to allow its bots explicitly in a web application firewall. We check the firewall rules as well as the file.
You can measure some of it
OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends people through, so that traffic shows up in your analytics by name. Google has introduced generative AI performance reports in Search Console. We set both up in the first week, so the monthly report measures clicks, not only mentions.
What the First Two Weeks Look Like
The audit is where every engagement starts, and it is useful on its own even if you fix everything yourself. The right-hand column is what we need from you to finish on time.
| When | What we do | What we need from you |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1–3 | We agree the questions your buyers actually ask — by service, by town, against named competitors — and run them across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity and Copilot, recording who is named and which sources are cited. | Twenty minutes on the questions, and the competitors you lose work to. |
| Days 3–7 | Technical checks: robots.txt and firewall rules against every crawler above, indexing, whether each key page has a quotable answer, schema, and your business facts across the directories assistants lean on. | Access to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, your analytics and your Google Business Profile. |
| Week 2 | The prioritised list: what is stopping you being named, ordered by what it costs you and how quickly it can be fixed, with the ones you can do yourself marked. | An hour to walk through it and decide which fixes you hand to us. |
| Monthly after that | The same questions, the same assistants, the same report format, so the comparison is honest — including when something has not worked. | Nothing routine, beyond approving content changes. |
For the plain-English version of how assistants decide who to name, read how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and what GEO actually is. If the site itself needs rebuilding so crawlers can read it, that is web development work, and if you are local, see how we work with Manchester businesses.
How We Get You Found by AI
We ask the assistants about you
We run the questions your buyers actually type — best in Manchester, who does this near me, alternatives to a competitor — and record what each assistant says, who it names instead of you, and where it got that from.
You get a list, in priority order
Not a strategy document. A list of what is stopping you being named, ordered by how much each one costs you and how quickly it can be fixed, with the ones you can do yourself marked as such.
We fix the ones you hand us
Content rewritten so the answer is quotable, schema corrected, crawler access unblocked, business facts made consistent everywhere an assistant might check.
We re-run the same questions monthly
Same prompts, same assistants, so the comparison is honest. You see whether you are being named more often than last month, and we say plainly when something has not worked.
What the monthly report looks like
The Assistants Your Buyers Actually Use
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AI SEO, in plain terms?
Work that makes an assistant more likely to name your business when someone asks it for a recommendation. In practice that means three things: making sure your pages can actually be fetched and quoted, writing them so the answer is the first thing on the page rather than buried, and making your business facts consistent across the sources assistants check. Some people call it GEO, generative engine optimisation. It is the same job.
How is this different from the SEO we already pay for?
Traditional SEO competes for a position in a list of links, where being tenth still gets a click. An assistant names two or three firms and stops, so there is no tenth place. The technical groundwork overlaps — a site that is fast, crawlable and properly marked up helps both — but the content work is different. Search rewards a page that covers a topic thoroughly; an assistant rewards a page that answers one question in a sentence it can lift.
How would we know whether it is working?
We run the same set of buyer questions across the same assistants every month and record what comes back: whether you were named, who was named instead, and which pages were cited. Because the prompts do not change, the month-to-month comparison is honest. You get that report whether the numbers moved or not, and we say plainly when something we tried has not worked.
How long before anything changes?
Technical fixes such as crawler access and schema can be reflected within weeks, because they change what an assistant is able to read. Being named more often is slower and depends on how competitive your sector is and how established the businesses currently being named are. Anyone promising a specific position by a specific date is guessing: none of these platforms publish how they weight sources, and we will tell you what we are inferring from testing rather than presenting it as documented fact.
Could this damage the rankings we already have?
It should not, and the order of work is designed so it cannot. The first changes are additive — making pages fetchable, marking up facts, correcting business details across directories — none of which removes anything you currently rank for. Where we do want to rewrite a page that already earns traffic, we say so first and we change one thing at a time, so if a position moves we know what moved it. Anyone willing to rewrite your best-performing page in week one without measuring it first is guessing with your traffic.
If we stop the programme, do we lose what we gained?
No, and this is a fair thing to test a supplier on. The work is done on your own site and in your own directory listings, so the schema, the rewritten pages and the corrected business facts stay yours whether or not we carry on. What stops is the monthly testing and the ongoing work, not the result. Nothing is hosted by us, nothing requires a licence from us, and there is no plugin of ours to remove.
Do you work with businesses outside Manchester?
Yes. We are based in Manchester and work with businesses across the UK remotely, with on-site visits around Greater Manchester and the North West where they help. Assistant visibility is not a local problem in the way map listings are, so where you are matters far less than which questions your buyers ask.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT or Google will recommend us?
No, and be wary of anyone who does. No assistant publishes how it chooses which businesses to name, and the answer to the same question changes from day to day. What we can do is remove the reasons you are being left out, run the same questions every month, and show you honestly whether you are named more often than before.
We block AI bots to protect our content. Does that stop us being cited?
It depends which ones. OpenAI documents separate crawlers: OAI-SearchBot decides whether a page can appear in ChatGPT search, while GPTBot collects training data, and the two can be allowed or blocked independently. Google says Google-Extended controls training and grounding in its other AI products, not inclusion in Search, where AI Overviews draw on ordinary Googlebot crawling. Plenty of sites block the search crawlers by accident, often through a firewall rule rather than robots.txt, and vanish from the answers they wanted to be in.
Does an llms.txt file make a difference?
Possibly, and it costs little, so we add one. But it is a proposed convention rather than something the major assistants document using, so we treat it as a small extra rather than the plan. The work that reliably matters is being crawlable, having quotable answers, and consistent facts in the places assistants check.
What a Project Looks Like
Every project is scoped and quoted after a free discovery call, so you get a fixed price for your situation rather than a number that assumes someone else’s. These are the shapes most engagements take.
AI Visibility Audit
Finding out whether AI assistants mention you, and why not.
Typical timeline: 1–2 weeks
- How ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI see you
- Technical and schema gaps
- Competitor citation analysis
- Prioritised action plan
GEO Programme
Businesses who want to be the one an assistant recommends, not the one it skips.
Typical timeline: Ongoing, 3-month minimum
- Everything in the audit
- Structured data and llms.txt
- Citation and content plan
- Monthly AI visibility report
Multi-Brand or Enterprise
Several sites, locations or brands needing coordinated visibility.
Typical timeline: Ongoing
- Several sites or locations
- Digital PR for AI citations
- Custom monitoring dashboard
- Quarterly strategy reviews
Timelines are typical and depend on how many systems are involved and how ready your data is. Tell us what you need and we will give you a fixed price and a date.
Read before you buy ai seo & geo
- AI SEO & GEO
How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT: A 12-Step Plan for UK Businesses (2026)
How ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot actually choose which businesses to mention, a 12-step plan a UK business can follow, prompts to test your own visibility, realistic timelines, and what an AI search agency charges in 2026.
- AI SEO & GEO
What Is GEO? Generative Engine Optimisation Explained for UK Businesses
What GEO actually is, how it differs from SEO, how assistants really retrieve and cite sources, and what it costs to get your business into AI answers.
- AI Development
Hire an AI Developer or Use an Agency? A UK Decision Guide for 2026
Employing an AI engineer, bringing in a contractor and hiring an agency are three different commitments with three different risks. What changed in UK employment law in 2026, and how to decide.
- AI Services
AI Development Cost UK: The Real 2026 Pricing Guide
What actually drives AI development cost in the UK for chatbots, voice agents, automation, integration, web apps, mobile apps and MVPs — plus offshore comparisons and the questions to ask before you sign a quote.
Is AI Recommending Your Business?
Bring the questions your buyers ask. On a free thirty-minute call we will look at what the main assistants say about you today and tell you honestly whether it is worth fixing — and, if it is, give you a fixed price for the audit.
Book a Free Discovery CallWhat you can hold us to
Plenty of agencies close this part of a page with client logos. We do not publish any, because we will not put a name or a number on this site that we cannot evidence. What follows instead is what you can check in a public register, and what sits in the contract either way.
What the discovery call actually is
Thirty minutes, free, no obligation and no salesperson. You describe what is costing you time or customers, we ask about the systems involved, and you leave with an honest view of whether this is worth doing. We regularly end that call by saying the tool you already pay for covers it.
You own the result
The code, the repository and the accounts are set up in your company name rather than ours, and they are yours on completion and full payment. Nothing runs on infrastructure we control, so ending the relationship does not end the thing we built.
A fixed price, never a day rate
Every project is quoted as a fixed price with a written scope after the call, so an over-run is our problem rather than yours. If the scope changes, we say so and re-quote before doing the work, not after.
Where your data sits
In the UK or EU, under a data processing agreement, kept only as long as you specify. Any model provider we rely on is named as a sub-processor rather than left implicit, and we will tell you plainly where something you have asked for would put a commitment of yours at risk.
What happens when it goes wrong
Agreed before launch rather than negotiated during an incident: what is covered, how quickly we respond, and what counts as new work. Every build has a defined escalation to a person, because the failure that costs you is the one nobody noticed.
Two things you can check
Big Berri Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 16562429, and registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under reference ZC119995. Both are public registers. Look us up rather than taking our word for it.