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What a mention actually is
There are two quite different ways your name can come out of an assistant, and confusing them wastes a lot of effort.
The first is retrieval. The assistant searches, gets pages back, reads them and writes an answer citing what it found. This is what happens with ChatGPT's search, with Perplexity, with Gemini grounding an answer in Google, and with Google's AI Overviews. It is live, it depends on what is currently indexed, and it is the one you can influence.
The second is the model recalling something from training. That is far hazier, far slower to change, weighted towards whatever was heavily discussed online, and effectively out of reach for a fifteen-person firm in Mansfield. Chasing it is not a strategy.
So the target is retrieval, and the useful reframing is this: you are not trying to persuade an algorithm. You are trying to make it trivially easy for something that reads quickly and cannot ring you up to establish four facts — what you do, where you do it, who you are, and why that is believable — from sources that agree with each other.
The four-facts framing is worth keeping in mind throughout, because it explains why some of the advice below concerns your website and quite a lot of it does not.
The condition nothing else survives
Before any of the rest, the pages have to be readable when fetched.
The crawlers behind these products are simple. They ask for a URL, take what comes back, and move on. They are not sitting waiting for an interface to assemble. If your website was built as a JavaScript application — which a large share of recently built small business sites were — then what they receive may be a shell with no words in it.
Test it in thirty seconds. Right-click your homepage, choose view source, and use find to look for a sentence you know appears on the page. Present means readable. Absent means every hour spent on anything else in this guide is wasted, and the job is a rebuild rather than an optimisation.
While you are there, three quick checks that cost nothing:
- Does robots.txt let them in? Some site builders and security plugins block AI agents by default now, and the owner usually has no idea. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot are the ones to look for if you want to be found.
- Does each page have its own title and description? Not the company name repeated fourteen times.
- Is your address and phone number in the HTML as text? Not only inside an image in the footer, which is more common than it should be.
Our web design page goes into why sites end up in this state and what a fix involves. It is not an exotic problem, but it is a binary one.
Pin down the facts about your firm
Sit down for half an hour and write the canonical version of your business. One document. This is the single most useful thing in this guide and almost nobody does it.
- Legal name and trading name, exactly as they appear at Companies House, and a decision about which one you lead with everywhere.
- Address in one format. Not “Unit 4” in one place and “Unit 4a” in another.
- One phone number for public listings. If you use call tracking numbers for advertising, keep the main listed number stable and consistent.
- The services, named the way customers say them rather than the way the trade says them.
- The areas, as real place names with a stated radius, rather than “the Midlands and surrounding areas”.
- Accreditations and memberships with registration numbers where they exist: CHAS, NICEIC, Gas Safe, FMB, a CITB or trade association number.
- Founded date, and a sentence about what the firm actually specialises in that a stranger could repeat accurately.
Now make every public appearance of your business match that document. Your site, your Google Business Profile, your Companies House record, your directory entries, your trade body listing, your supplier partner page, your Facebook page.
Why this matters more here than it did in ordinary local SEO: a generative system is built to avoid saying things it cannot support. When three sources disagree about whether you cover Nottingham, the safe behaviour is to say nothing about you at all and name a firm whose details are unambiguous. You do not lose because you are worse. You lose because you are unclear.
The commonest sources of that muddle are all mundane. A firm that rebranded four years ago and left the old name on six directory entries. A second Google listing created by an employee for a van depot that no longer exists. A qualification that lapsed and is still advertised. An address that changed and was updated on the website but nowhere else. None of these are deceptions; they are the residue of a business that has been trading for a while. Spend an evening searching your own company name, your phone number and your postcode, list every public page that comes back, and correct or remove the ones that contradict your document. It is tedious and it is the closest thing to a reliable lever anybody has in this area.
The half that happens on other sites
You can write the best page in your county and still not be named, because a single self-description is weak evidence. What carries weight is agreement across sources that have no relationship with each other.
In rough order of usefulness for a UK trade firm:
Google Business Profile, properly filled in
Categories right, service list populated, real photographs of your own work, opening hours accurate, and a steady flow of genuine reviews rather than a cluster of eleven in one week. This remains the strongest single local signal, and it feeds Google's understanding of what you are.
The registers that verify something
Gas Safe, NICEIC, FENSA, CHAS, Constructionline, TrustMark, your trade association. These pages exist independently of you and confirm a fact about you that you cannot confirm alone. They are worth more than a dozen generic directory listings.
Suppliers and manufacturers
Approved installer pages, merchant case studies, manufacturer training records. Trade firms routinely have these and never think to check whether the details on them are correct.
Local press and genuinely local sites
A project write-up in a regional paper, a sponsorship page for a junior football club, a council framework listing. Small, real, and impossible to fake at scale.
Ordinary directories, last
Useful only for consistency of your core details. Their marginal value has been falling for a decade and nothing about AI search has reversed that.
None of this is new advice; it is the citation and authority work described on our SEO page, which predates any of these products. What has changed is the payoff. Consistency used to be hygiene. It is now closer to being the qualifying condition for being described at all.
Pages worth writing for this
Write for the question, not for the keyword. The pages that get pulled into answers are the ones that resolve something specific, and for trade firms the recurring shapes are these.
- Cost pages that commit to a range. “What does a new consumer unit cost in the East Midlands” with a stated range, what moves it up, what moves it down, and the date the figures were last reviewed. A page that refuses to give a number is useless to a system whose entire job is answering the question.
- Regulatory and process pages. Do you need a licence for a pavement gantry, does a rewire need building control notification, what a Part P certificate is. These are genuinely searched, answerable, and the sort of thing a firm with real experience can write and a content mill cannot.
- Service-plus-place pages that contain actual local detail. Conservation area constraints, a council's permit process, the stone or brick common in that town, jobs you have done there. Eight real ones. Not four hundred spun from a template, which is precisely what Google's scaled content abuse policy exists to catch.
- A page that answers who you are. Founded when, how many crews, what you will and will not take on, the accreditations with numbers. Dull to write, disproportionately useful for retrieval.
Structure each one the same way. The heading is the question. The first two sentences answer it. Then the detail, the caveats and the exceptions. Then a review date. Our guides index is written to that shape throughout, and the calculators exist for the same reason: a concrete answer beats a paragraph of positioning.
Testing it without fooling yourself
Build a list of twenty questions a real buyer would type. Mix them: service-plus-town, cost, comparison, urgency. Run them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot once a month, and keep the answers in a document with the date.
Then apply the discipline, because this is where people mislead themselves badly. Use a logged-out session where you can. Do not count the run where you asked leadingly. Record who else was named, not only whether you were, because the competitors who keep appearing are telling you what these systems consider credible in your patch.
Be clear-eyed about what this is. It is one person, in one place, on one account, asking a system whose output varies by user and by session and sometimes between two identical prompts a minute apart. It is observation. There is no rank tracker for this and there is no dashboard, and if a month's testing shows you appearing more often, that is encouraging rather than proven.
Alongside it, watch analytics for referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. The volume is typically small. The behaviour is often notably good, because the visitor arrives having already been told you are worth talking to. And remember that the best outcome — a complete answer naming you, acted on by a phone call — leaves no referral at all.
What to skip
Three things are being sold into this gap that we would not spend your money on.
Guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or Gemini. There is no submission, no paid inclusion and no appeal, the selection logic is not published, and the output is not deterministic. The promise cannot be verified even in principle, which is the whole appeal of making it.
Bulk AI-written pages aimed at answer engines. The same scaled content problem as before, with the added irony that a retriever matching your fourteen near-identical pages will pick one and ignore the rest, if it does not treat the lot as low quality first.
Anything sold on a proprietary AI visibility score. If the number is the vendor's own construction and you cannot reproduce it from a public source, it is marketing collateral. The benchmarks page sets out the standard we hold third-party figures to, and most of what circulates in this field does not clear it.
What is worth your money is boring and durable: readable HTML, one consistent set of facts about your firm everywhere it appears, a handful of pages that genuinely answer things, and reviews that keep arriving. If that sounds like the same advice as five years ago with a new label on it, that is because it largely is — which our methodology page would rather admit than obscure. If you want a second opinion on where your firm currently stands, a short call will establish it faster than a month of prompt testing.
Rather have someone else do this?We run exactly this for trade and construction firms across the UK. Call and we will tell you what is realistic in your area, including when the answer is that it is not worth it.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
Can I pay to appear in an AI assistant's answers?
Not as an organic citation. There is no submission process and no paid inclusion for the cited sources in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity answers. Some of these products do carry advertising of their own, which is a separate and clearly labelled thing. Anyone offering to place you inside the answer itself is describing a mechanism that does not exist.
Does my Google Business Profile matter for ChatGPT?
Indirectly and probably quite a lot. A well-maintained profile is the most consistent public statement of what your business is, where it works and how people rate it, and that information is widely mirrored across the web. Exactly how each assistant weighs it is not publicly documented, but a firm with a strong, accurate, actively reviewed profile is a firm whose details are easy to corroborate from several directions.
How many reviews do I need?
There is no threshold anybody can give you honestly. What is observable is that recency and steadiness read better than volume collected in bursts, and that reviews mentioning the specific job and the specific town carry information a generic five-star rating does not. Four a month, consistently, beats forty in a fortnight and then silence for a year.
Should I write a blog post every week for this?
No. Frequency is not the lever here; specificity is. One page that answers what a job costs in your area, with a range and a review date, will be retrieved more often than a year of weekly posts about industry news. Write the page when you have something concrete to say, then keep it up to date.
My website is a Wix or Squarespace site. Am I finished?
Not necessarily. Some builders output perfectly readable HTML and some output a JavaScript shell, and the only way to know which you have is to view the source and search for a sentence from the page. Check before you assume either way. If the text is there, the rest of this guide applies to you normally.