AI Optimisation · 7 min read · Updated
How to get ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI to recommend your business
AI assistants recommend businesses they can verify, understand and trust. To be recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews, a UK small business needs four things: structured website data (Organization and Service schema), consistent name, address and phone across the web, third-party signals such as reviews and directory listings, and content that answers buyers' real questions.
How AI assistants pick which business to mention
Modern LLM-powered search systems combine three sources: their training data, real-time web retrieval, and a verification step that cross-references claims against trusted sources. To be recommended, you need to appear in at least two of the three.
That means a beautiful website alone isn't enough — and a strong Google Business Profile alone isn't enough either. The businesses that get recommended consistently appear in both.
The seven signals that trigger AI recommendations
1. Structured identity — Organization and LocalBusiness JSON-LD with consistent name, address, phone, opening hours and service area (see our schema markup guide).
2. Service-level schema — Service schema for each offering with priceRange, areaServed and provider details.
3. Direct-answer content — opening paragraphs that answer the question implied by the page title in 40–60 words.
4. Conversational FAQs — 4–6 questions per page in the user's own words, marked up with FAQPage schema.
5. Third-party validation — Google reviews (15+ recent), directory listings, industry association memberships, press mentions.
6. Crawler permissions — robots.txt allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot.
7. A llms.txt file — root-level plain-English brief that tells assistants exactly who you are and what you offer.
The mistakes that get businesses ignored
The single biggest mistake we see is hiding the answer. Pages that open with a hero headline and three carousels of imagery before any plain-English description give the AI nothing to extract. The second biggest is inconsistent NAP — a phone number that differs by one digit between the website footer, Google Business Profile and a Yell.com listing is enough for the AI to deprioritise the business as 'unverifiable'.
The third is silent crawler blocks. Many WordPress themes, Wix templates and Shopify defaults silently block AI bots. We've audited dozens of sites whose owners thought they were AI-ready but were quietly invisible.
Published 16 May 2025 by Quality Website. General guidance, not legal or financial advice.