Why Is ChatGPT Recommending My Competitors and Not Me?
Because, as far as the AI can tell, they exist and you don’t. That’s the blunt version, and fixing it is what this article is about.
Picture a homeowner in Esher whose boiler has just given up. Five years ago they’d have typed “emergency plumber Esher” into Google and scanned ten blue links. Today there’s a good chance they ask ChatGPT instead, or Perplexity, or they just read the AI Overview that Google now puts above its own results. What they get back is something like: “Two well reviewed emergency plumbers serving Esher are…”
Two names. Not ten. That changes everything about being found online.
The industry has given this a name, Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), which makes it sound more complicated than it is. When an AI answers a question about your trade in your town, you want it to say your name. That’s it.
Here’s the encouraging part. AI assistants don’t pick names by magic. They pick them from what they can read and verify on the open web, and in a market the size of Woking or Walton the bar is low, because most of your competitors haven’t even started. We audit Surrey small-business sites every week and the usual finding isn’t “this will be hard to win”. It’s “nobody here is trying yet”.
Where Do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini Get Their Answers?
Each one looks somewhere slightly different, and it’s worth knowing where before you try to be the answer.
ChatGPT answers from its training plus, when it browses, from Bing’s search index. If your business barely exists on Bing, and plenty of Surrey small-business sites have never been submitted there, ChatGPT’s live answers can’t find you.
Perplexity is a search engine at heart. It runs real web searches and cites its sources. Ask it for “the best web design agencies in Surrey” and it reads the top local pages, then names who they name.
Gemini leans on Google’s index and Google’s Knowledge Graph, the same machinery behind your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your map listing. Google’s AI Overviews are assembled from pages Google already ranks and trusts for that exact local query (“patio installer Weybridge”, “dog groomer Hersham”), with a strong preference for pages that answer directly.
Notice what all four have in common: ordinary local search visibility plus signals a machine can verify. AEO isn’t a replacement for local SEO. It’s local SEO with a higher bar and a much smaller winners’ circle.
“In a town the size of Walton, you don’t need to outrank the internet. You need to be the clearest, most trusted answer for one place and one trade.”
Why Is My Business Not Showing Up in ChatGPT?
Nine times out of ten, because something is blocking the AI from reading your website. This is the most common fault we find in audits, and the easiest to fix. Security plugins, cheap-hosting firewalls and copy-pasted robots.txt files routinely lock out the exact crawlers you want to let in:
- GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI and ChatGPT)
- PerplexityBot
- Google-Extended, and sometimes Googlebot itself
- Bingbot, which matters more than people think, because ChatGPT browses through Bing
Ask whoever looks after your site to check robots.txt and the firewall’s bot rules, and to verify the site in both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. For a local firm, getting properly indexed on Bing is often the quickest win on this whole list, simply because almost no competitor in your town has bothered.
What Kind of Content Gets Picked Up by Google’s AI Overviews?
Content that answers a real question, completely, near the top of the page. AI Overviews quote pages that do the job for them, and so does Perplexity, with a citation link back to you.
Start from what your customers in Surrey genuinely ask:
- “How much does a new bathroom cost in Surrey?”
- “Do I need planning permission for a driveway in Elmbridge?”
- “Best family dentist near Walton-on-Thames”
- “How much should a small business website cost?”
Then build the page the way an AI wants to read it. Use the customer’s question as the heading, phrased the way they’d say it, town included. Answer it fully in the first two or three sentences, and only then expand for the humans who want detail. Give each question its own page rather than burying twenty answers in one generic services page. And add a real FAQ section covering the follow-up questions you already answer on the phone every week.
A national chain can’t write credibly about Elmbridge planning quirks or what things actually cost in Surrey. You can. That’s your moat, and it’s one the big firms genuinely can’t copy.
How Do I Make My Business Easy for AI to Read?
Your customers read your website. AI systems read your structured data, the schema markup embedded in your pages that states plainly who you are, what you do and where you do it. For a Surrey small business the essentials are LocalBusiness schema on every page (name, towns served, phone, hours), FAQPage schema on your question-and-answer content, Service schema for each thing you sell, review markup where you genuinely hold reviews, and Article schema with a named author on anything you publish.
Then there’s consistency, which is where small businesses quietly lose. Your name, address and description need to match everywhere they appear: website, Google Business Profile, Companies House, Checkatrade or your industry’s directory, Facebook, the Surrey Chambers listing. To Google’s Knowledge Graph, every consistent mention makes your business a more solid, recommendable entity. Every old address or inconsistent trading name makes the machine less sure of you. Machines don’t recommend things they’re unsure of.
How Do I Get AI to Trust My Business Enough to Recommend It?
By giving it evidence it can check. AI assistants are deliberately cautious about recommending businesses, and they weigh the same signals Google calls E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. For a local firm that comes down to a few practical things.
Put a named owner with a real history on the site. “Founded by Ed, 25 years in the trade, based in Hersham” is worth more to a machine, and to a customer, than an anonymous “about us” page.
Publish real local case studies. Named clients, real streets, real outcomes. A loft conversion in Weybridge finished in nine weeks is the hardest kind of content on the internet to fake, which is exactly why it carries weight.
Collect reviews where AI actually reads them. Google reviews feed Gemini and AI Overviews directly. Checkatrade, Trustpilot and the industry platforms get crawled and quoted too.
And get mentioned by other people. Local press like the Surrey Advertiser, supplier pages, the village directory, local Facebook groups, and yes, Reddit threads. When someone in a “recommendations for Walton?” thread names your business, that’s a sentence an AI can later repeat.
“An AI will only say your name if it has seen other people in Surrey say it first.”
Does My Google Business Profile Affect AI Answers?
Enormously. For “near me” questions, the bread and butter of every Surrey trade and shop, your Google Business Profile matters as much as your website. Gemini and AI Overviews pull your hours, services, photos, review score and even the text of your reviews straight from it.
- Claim it and complete every field: services, areas, real photos of real jobs.
- Pick the most precise category for your trade, and set the service area you’ll actually drive to.
- Gather reviews steadily and reply to every one. The replies get read too.
- Post updates now and again, so the profile reads as a business that’s still trading.
- Keep the name, address and phone identical to your website, to the digit.
A Surrey business with a complete, active, well reviewed profile routinely beats a bigger competitor with a neglected one, in the map pack and in the AI answer alike.
How Do I Check What ChatGPT and Google AI Say About My Business?
Ask them. It’s the simplest and most revealing test in modern marketing, and almost nobody does it. Put “best [your trade] in [your town]” to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Search your own services on Google and see whose names the AI Overview gives. If it’s not you, the sections above are the gap.
While you’re at it, keep the site looking alive. AI answers lean towards current sources, and a website untouched since 2021 reads as abandoned to a machine deciding whom to trust. Refresh your key pages a few times a year and date things honestly.
Your analytics will tell you when the work starts paying off: visits arriving from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. That traffic converts unusually well, because the AI has already made the recommendation for you.
This is the work we do at Cumulus Digital for Surrey clients, and we track it over time through our own Cumulus Rank and Reporting platform, so you can watch your business start surfacing in search and AI answers month by month.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?
Make sure ChatGPT can find and trust you: allow the AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and Bingbot) on your website, get indexed in Bing as well as Google, publish pages that directly answer the questions your customers ask, add LocalBusiness schema, and build up reviews and mentions of your business on other sites. ChatGPT recommends businesses it has repeatedly seen described, reviewed and recommended elsewhere, so the job is making yours the best evidenced answer for your trade and your town.
Is this different from the local SEO I’ve already done?
It builds straight on it. Everything that ranks you in Walton, Woking or Guildford also makes you citable. AEO adds the newer layers on top: direct-answer content, structured data, consistency across listings, Bing, and mentions beyond your own site. If you’ve done local SEO properly, you’re starting from halfway.
Can a small business really compete with national firms in AI answers?
For local questions, you have the advantage. When someone asks about a service in Shepperton or Cobham, the AI wants a local answer, and a national brand’s generic page is a worse match than your specific, trusted, well reviewed local one. The businesses losing out aren’t the small ones. They’re the invisible ones.
Can I pay to be in AI answers?
Not the organic citations. Ads are creeping in around some AI products, but the recommendations inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews are earned. That’s exactly why a customer in Surrey trusts them, and why being named is worth so much.
How long before I see results?
Technical fixes (crawler access, Bing indexing, schema, a completed Business Profile) can move things within weeks. Reviews, local mentions and expert content build over months. The Surrey businesses being cited today mostly started the groundwork a year ago. In a local market this early, starting now still means starting ahead.
Be the Name the AI Gives Your Town
Somewhere in Surrey today, a customer is asking an AI the exact question your business answers for a living, and the AI will give them two or three names. Honest local expertise, structured so machines can read it, backed by your reviews and your neighbours: that’s how yours becomes one of them.
If you’d like to know what ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews currently say about your business, and what it would take to change it, talk to us. We’re in Surrey too, and we’ll tell you straight.