Why Your Competitor Is in the ChatGPT Answer and You Are Not
Ask ChatGPT for "a good accountant in Manchester" or "who builds e-commerce sites in the North West" and it will name businesses. Some are excellent. Some are simply the ones whose websites and listings made it easy for the assistant to be confident about them, and being in that second group is largely within your control.
This guide explains how AI assistants pick businesses, gives a 12-step plan, and sets out what an AI search agency does and what sets its price. Background on generative engine optimisation is at /blog/what-is-geo-generative-engine-optimisation-2025.
How AI Assistants Actually Choose Businesses to Mention
The assistants that matter for UK buyers are ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot. They work differently under the hood, but the pattern of what they reward is consistent.
They retrieve from the live web, then summarise. For any question about a local or commercial service, these assistants do not answer from memory. ChatGPT's search feature draws on Bing's index (and OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot), Copilot runs on Bing directly, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode pull from the standard Google Search index, and Perplexity uses its own PerplexityBot index plus partner sources. Each fetches a handful of pages and writes an answer from them. If your site is not indexed or not returned for those searches, you cannot be mentioned.
They cite pages that answer the question directly. A page that opens with "We are a Manchester web development agency working with UK retailers, on fixed-price projects agreed after a discovery call" gives the model a quotable fact. A page that opens with a hero image and "Welcome to a world of digital possibilities" gives it nothing.
They check that facts agree across the web. When an assistant sees the same business name, address, phone number, service list and location on your website, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Companies House and a couple of directories, it can state those facts with confidence. When the details disagree, the safest thing for the model to do is leave you out.
They lean on reviews and third-party mentions. Assistants prefer sources they can corroborate. A business mentioned on a trade body site, a local news piece and a directory with reviews looks real in a way a business that only exists on its own domain does not, and review counts and ratings on Google and Trustpilot are frequently quoted verbatim in answers.
Structured data helps the machine read the page. Schema markup for Organization, LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage does not guarantee a citation, but removes ambiguity about what a page is and what it offers. Google Search Central's own guidance confirms there is no separate index for AI Overviews and AI Mode: the same signals that help a page rank in normal Search can surface it there. For the other assistants the benefit is inferred rather than documented, and it is cheap to add regardless.
Speed and server rendering matter more than people expect. AI crawlers fetch pages with a tight budget and often do not execute JavaScript, so a client-side rendered site can look empty to the crawler. Server-rendered, fast pages are consistently easier to get cited; see /blog/web-development-manchester-ai-ready-websites-2025.
A 12-Step Plan to Get Recommended by AI Assistants
Work through these in order. Steps 1-6 are mostly technical; steps 7-12 take months and compound.
- 1. Let the crawlers in. Check robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT's search citations), PerplexityBot and Bingbot, since blocking any of these is what actually removes you from citations. Per OpenAI's and Perplexity's own crawler documentation, GPTBot and Google-Extended only govern whether your content can be used to train future models, so blocking them alone will not hide you from citations. Many UK sites block the search-relevant crawlers by accident because a plugin or developer added a blanket "block all bots" rule.
- 2. Open every service page with the answer. The first paragraph should state what you do, for whom, where, and how pricing works, even on a quote-on-enquiry model. Put the marketing copy after that, not before it.
- 3. Add an FAQ block to every service and location page. A handful of genuine questions customers ask, each answered in two to four sentences — these are the passages assistants quote most often.
- 4. State service and location facts plainly. Name the city, the areas you cover and the sectors you serve in ordinary sentences. "We work with clients across Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Lancashire" is retrievable; a map graphic is not.
- 5. Add schema markup. Organization or LocalBusiness on the home page, Service on each service page, FAQPage wherever there is an FAQ block, and Article on blog posts, with details identical to the visible text.
- 6. Publish an llms.txt file. A plain-text summary at yourdomain.com/llms.txt describing the business, services, locations and key pages. This is a community convention, not an official, adopted web standard; a World Wide Web Consortium working draft published in 2026 is looking to formalise it, and support among assistants is uneven today. It still costs an hour to write and gives any crawler that checks for it a clean summary to work from.
- 7. Make pages fast and server-rendered. If your site depends on JavaScript to show its content, fix that first. Our web development service at /services/web-app-development builds sites with this in mind from the start.
- 8. Fix your NAP everywhere. Name, address and phone number must match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Companies House, and directories such as Clutch, Yell and Thomson Local. One old address on a forgotten directory is enough to introduce doubt.
- 9. Earn mentions on UK trade and local sites. Chamber of commerce listings, sector associations, local business news and guest articles on trade publications are each a corroborating source for the assistant.
- 10. Publish comparison and cost-driver content. "How much does X cost in the UK", "X versus Y for a UK business", and "how to choose an X provider" pages are exactly the questions people ask assistants. Answer them honestly by explaining what drives the price, even without quoting a figure.
- 11. Refresh content on a schedule. Assistants prefer recent, dated pages. Update examples and dates on core pages every quarter, and say when the page was last reviewed.
- 12. Monitor your visibility monthly. Run the same prompts every month across the assistants, record who is mentioned, and track changes. Without this you are guessing.
Prompts to Test Your Own Visibility
Run these yourself, adapting the service and location to your business, and record which businesses are named and whether the facts about you are correct.
| Intent | Example prompt for a Manchester business |
|---|---|
| Direct recommendation | Who are the best AI development agencies in Manchester? |
| Local service search | Recommend a web development company in Manchester for an e-commerce site |
| Comparison | Compare AI chatbot developers in the North West of England |
| Problem-led | My Manchester business is not showing up in ChatGPT. Who can help? |
| Fact check | What services does BigBerri in Manchester offer, and where are they based? |
Run each prompt in ChatGPT with search enabled, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Copilot a few times, since answers vary between sessions, and count how often you appear.
Common Mistakes That Keep UK Businesses Out of AI Answers
- •Blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Bingbot in robots.txt. The single most common issue we find on audits, and the fastest to fix.
- •Thin service pages. A short page with a contact form gives the assistant nothing to quote. Aim for a page that could genuinely answer a buyer's first five questions.
- •No pricing signal at all. Assistants are asked about cost constantly. Sites that say nothing about how pricing works are routinely skipped in favour of sites that explain it, even without a published figure.
- •Inconsistent business details. Different trading names, an old office address on a directory, different phone numbers on different listings.
- •Content only in JavaScript, PDFs or images. If the crawler cannot read it as text, it does not exist.
- •Treating it as a one-off. Citations shift monthly as competitors publish and indexes refresh.
What to Measure, and Realistic Timelines
Measure: share of tracked prompts where your business is mentioned, by assistant; which of your pages are cited, and for which prompts; accuracy of the facts assistants state about you; referral visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and Google AI surfaces in your analytics; and enquiries that mention finding you through an AI assistant, which means asking on your contact form.
Timelines, as a typical guide: technical fixes (crawler access, schema, llms.txt, answer-first rewrites) are usually implemented within weeks, with changes visible in assistants a little after re-crawling; NAP clean-up and directory corrections take longer depending on how many listings need chasing; citations, mentions and review growth take a few months before the effect is consistent; and a stable presence across a set of commercial prompts in a competitive category is closer to a year's effort.
Anyone promising a guaranteed position in ChatGPT answers within days is selling something that does not exist. Nobody outside those companies controls the output.
What an AI Search Agency Does, and What Decides the Price
An AI search agency (sometimes called a GEO agency or AI SEO agency) does the twelve steps above on your behalf. A good engagement covers an audit, answer-first rewrites of core pages, schema and an llms.txt file, entity and NAP consistency, a UK citation programme, and monthly prompt monitoring.
Engagements are generally structured in three tiers, and what moves you between them is not arbitrary:
| Engagement | What is included | What sets the price |
|---|---|---|
| AI search audit | Crawler, rendering, schema, entity and visibility review with a prioritised fix list | Site size and how much needs auditing |
| Monthly programme | Content rewrites, technical implementation, citation building, monthly monitoring and reporting | Number of pages, competitiveness of your category |
| Enterprise or multi-location | Multiple sites or locations, sector-specific content programmes, custom monitoring | Number of locations or sites, complexity of monitoring |
If an agency cannot show you its monitoring method, or bundles this into a conventional SEO retainer without any assistant-specific work, ask what exactly changes on your site as a result.
How BigBerri Approaches AI Search
We are a Manchester AI search agency and AI development company. We build our own AI products, so we work with the models and retrieval systems that power these assistants every day, and we apply what we learn about how they read the web to client sites.
Our engagement starts with a fixed-price AI search audit covering crawler access, rendering, schema, entity consistency and a baseline of your visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Copilot for a set of prompts we agree with you. You get a prioritised list of fixes whether or not you carry on with us. The monthly programme then works through the twelve steps above and reports every month on where you appear. Full details are at /ai-seo.
If you want to know whether your business is visible to AI assistants today, book a free discovery call at /contact.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?
For commercial and local questions, ChatGPT with search runs web searches, fetches a handful of pages and writes an answer from them. It favours pages that answer the question directly, businesses whose name, address and services are consistent across the web, and companies corroborated by reviews, directories and third-party mentions. If your site blocks its crawler or is not indexed, it cannot mention you.
How long does it take to appear in ChatGPT and AI search answers?
Technical fixes such as crawler access, schema markup and answer-first page rewrites are typically implemented in two to six weeks and show up within a few weeks of re-crawling. Citation building and review growth usually take three to six months to have a consistent effect, and a stable presence in a competitive category is a six to twelve month effort.
How much does an AI search agency cost in the UK?
It depends on your site size and how competitive your category is. A one-off AI search audit is priced by how much needs reviewing, and an ongoing programme is priced by page count and citation-building effort; multi-location or enterprise engagements are quoted individually. Book a free discovery call at /contact and we will give you a fixed price once we know your site.
Can I check whether my business appears in ChatGPT myself?
Yes. Write eight to ten prompts a customer might ask, such as recommending a provider in your city or comparing providers in your sector, and run each two or three times in ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Copilot. Record who is mentioned and which pages are cited. Repeat monthly to track change.
Is getting recommended by ChatGPT the same as SEO?
It overlaps but is not the same. Conventional SEO still matters because assistants retrieve from search indexes. Generative engine optimisation adds work SEO does not usually cover: allowing the AI crawlers that power citations, answer-first page structure, FAQ blocks, an llms.txt file, entity consistency across directories and Companies House, and monitoring assistant answers rather than rankings.