How ChatGPT Picks Which Business to Recommend | What You Can Control

I'll tell you the exact moment I became obsessed with this.

I was helping a friend move house in Stevenage. The boiler was making a noise that sounded like a cat trapped inside a washing machine. He said "hang on" and just asked ChatGPT: "emergency boiler repair near Stevenage, who should I call?"

It gave him a name. One name. He rang them. They came out that evening.

I sat there thinking... how did it pick that company? Out of every heating engineer within twenty miles, why that one? What did they do differently? And what about all the other plumbers and gas engineers who are perfectly good at their jobs but never got a look in?

That question has basically been my job ever since.

One name. Not ten links.

This is the thing that throws people when I explain it.

Google gives you a page of results. A map pack. Adverts. Organic listings. You scroll, you click around, you compare. Multiple businesses get a chance to impress you.

ChatGPT gives you a name.

Sometimes two. Occasionally three. But usually one. "I'd recommend [business name] based in [town], they specialise in [thing you asked about]." Done. Conversation over. That person is now calling that business and nobody else.

For local businesses in North Hertfordshire, this is a completely different game. There's no "being on page one." You're either the recommendation or you're not mentioned at all.

It's looking for answers, not adverts

OK so I've spent a lot of time testing this. Different trades. Different towns. Different phrasings. Hitchin, Letchworth, Baldock, Royston, Stevenage, St Albans. Plumbers, electricians, solicitors, dentists, accountants, personal trainers, dog walkers. Probably over two hundred queries at this point.

The pattern is clear.

ChatGPT recommends businesses whose websites directly answer the question being asked. Not vaguely. Not sort of. Directly.

If someone asks "how much does a new kitchen cost in Baldock?", ChatGPT is looking for a page that says something like "a full kitchen installation in the Baldock area typically costs between £8,000 and £15,000 depending on the size of the space and the materials you choose." That's an answer. That's useful. That's something it can reference and feel confident about.

If your website says "contact us for a quote" and nothing else?

Next.

I'm not saying you have to publish your exact prices. But giving people a realistic range, a ballpark, something, that's the difference between being recommended and being invisible.

Geography is not optional

Right, this one's going to sound almost insultingly obvious. But I'm going to say it anyway because I have audited well over a hundred local business websites and the majority of them get this wrong.

ChatGPT does not guess where you work.

If your website never mentions Letchworth, ChatGPT will not recommend you when someone asks about Letchworth. Even if you're based there. Even if you've done a hundred jobs there. If the words aren't on the page, they don't exist as far as AI is concerned.

Name your towns. Every page. Homepage, service pages, about page, FAQ page. "We serve Hitchin, Letchworth, Baldock, Royston, Stevenage, and surrounding villages across North Hertfordshire." Write it out. Every time.

A tree surgeon I know added his service areas to every page on his site. Twelve towns. Took him about twenty minutes. Within a month ChatGPT was recommending him for tree surgery in three of those towns. He hadn't done anything else to his website. Just added the words.

Proof beats promises

Here's something I find interesting.

When I test queries, the businesses that get recommended almost always have some form of evidence on their website. Not just "we're experienced" or "quality guaranteed" (those phrases mean absolutely nothing to AI or humans). Actual evidence.

Case studies. Reviews. Testimonials with specifics. Before and after photos. Project descriptions with details like "we installed a composite deck in a garden in Hitchin for a family with three young kids, the whole project took eight days."

That's proof. That's something ChatGPT can point to and say "this business has demonstrably done this kind of work in this area."

A website that just makes claims without backing them up? AI treats it the same way you'd treat someone at the pub who tells you they're brilliant at everything but can't give you a single example. Scepticism. And then it picks someone else.

We've written separately about how to format case studies for AI search if you want specifics on how to do this well.

The name thing

Boring but important.

Your business name has to be the same everywhere. Website. Google Business Profile. Facebook. Checkatrade. Yell. Bark. Everywhere.

"Dan's Decorating" on your website and "Daniel's Decorating Services Ltd" on Google and "Dans Decorating Hitchin" on Facebook? That's three different businesses as far as AI is concerned. It can't confidently say they're the same entity, so it doesn't recommend any of them with full confidence.

One afternoon. Go through everything. Make it match. Bloody tedious but it matters.

Structure isn't just nice to have

AI reads your website like a machine (because it is one). And machines are much better at understanding content that's clearly structured.

Short paragraphs. Descriptive headings. FAQ sections where the heading is literally the question and the text below is the answer. Bullet points where they make sense. Clear separation between topics.

A wall of text with no headings, no structure, no logical flow? AI struggles to pull anything useful from it. It's not impossible, but you're making its job harder. And when the competition has a well-structured page that answers the same question clearly, guess who gets recommended.

If you want more on this, we've got a whole post about structuring your website for AI search visibility.

Your Google Business Profile feeds into this too

Bit of a tangent but it's relevant.

ChatGPT doesn't just read your website. It pulls from multiple sources. And your Google Business Profile is one of the biggest ones. Your categories, your services list, your reviews, your photos. All of that feeds into whether AI feels confident enough to recommend you.

A complete, active, well-reviewed Google profile plus a website that answers real questions clearly? That's how you get recommended. One without the other is only doing half the job.

The uncomfortable truth about competition

I tested "best plumber in Hitchin" across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity last month.

Three different tools. Three different recommendations. But in every case, the recommended business had the same things: clear service descriptions, town names on every page, real reviews with specific detail, and recent activity on their Google profile.

The plumbers who didn't get mentioned? Their websites were either vague, outdated, thin on content, or just didn't mention Hitchin specifically enough.

Not because they're bad plumbers. Some of them are probably excellent. But AI can only work with what it can find. And it couldn't find enough about them to feel confident making a recommendation.

That's the gap. And right now, across North Hertfordshire, most businesses haven't noticed it exists.

If you want to know where your business stands, whether AI is recommending you or your competitors, give us a call. We work with local businesses on AEO across North Hertfordshire and we'll tell you honestly what needs doing and where to start.