Can ChatGPT recommend your trade business?

ChatGPT can suggest businesses when someone asks for help finding a local tradesperson. You can make accurate information about your business easier to find, but you can’t guarantee a recommendation.

Start with your website: say what work you do, where you do it and how to contact you. Then check that ChatGPT’s search crawler can reach it. Those are useful jobs you can act on without buying an “AI visibility” package.

What does being recommended actually mean?

There’s a difference between ChatGPT finding your website when asked about your business by name and suggesting you when someone asks for a decorator in their town.

The first checks whether it can find information about a named business. The second asks it to choose possible businesses for a job. Passing the first check doesn’t promise the second.

ChatGPT can search the web and include source links in its answers. Check whether it actually used search before treating an answer as a check of current information. OpenAI’s web search guidance explains that search activity and citations appear when it uses the tool.

Put the useful facts on your website

Read your homepage as if you’d never heard of the business. Can you answer these questions without opening a photo or downloading a brochure?

What’s the business called?
Which jobs do you take on?
Which towns or areas do you cover?
Do you work for homeowners, landlords, businesses or a mixture?
How should someone ask about a job?

Write the answers in ordinary page text. A van photo might show your phone number, but it’s still worth typing that number beside a working contact link.

Here’s a made-up example for a decorator:

Westfield Decorating takes on interior painting, wallpaper hanging and woodwork painting for homeowners in York, Acomb and Haxby. For a quote, send a short description of the rooms, a few photos and the postcode. We’ll reply to arrange a visit if the job is a fit.

Use your own services and the places you actually work. Don’t add “emergency”, “24-hour” or a qualification because it sounds useful in a search. Only include it if it’s true.

Add a few recent jobs with a short explanation of what you did. A caption such as “Hall, stairs and landing repainted in an occupied house” tells a prospective customer more than “Another happy customer”. Get permission before sharing a customer’s home or identifying details.

These are practical ways to explain your business clearly. They aren’t a published formula for ChatGPT recommendations. Our tradesman website checklist covers the other details a customer will want to see.

Ask your website provider to check search access

OpenAI has a crawler called OAI-SearchBot, which is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features. Its crawler documentation recommends allowing that crawler in your website’s robots.txt file and allowing traffic from its published IP addresses.

You don’t need to work through the settings yourself. Send your website provider this:

Please check whether OAI-SearchBot can crawl my public website. Is it allowed by robots.txt, and do our hosting or firewall settings block requests from OpenAI’s published search crawler IP addresses? Please check that the main service and contact information is readable on the public pages too.

Allowing a crawler gives it access; it doesn’t guarantee a recommendation.

Search access and model training are separate settings. OpenAI says you can allow OAI-SearchBot while blocking GPTBot, its training crawler. You don’t have to allow training to allow search discovery. The same OpenAI documentation explains the distinction.

Check the other places customers find you

If an old directory listing has your previous number, correct it. If your Facebook Page says you cover a town you no longer travel to, update it. Check the business name, services, website link and contact details on the listings you actually use.

This is sensible housekeeping for customers who find different versions of your details. Don’t treat it as proof that ChatGPT uses a particular directory or gives it a particular weight.

Keep your Google Business Profile useful too, but treat that as a separate job. Our Google Maps guide for tradespeople explains eligibility, verification and adding your website. Creating a website doesn’t create a Maps listing.

Try two checks and read the sources

Use ChatGPT with web search available. Replace the brackets in these illustrative prompts with your details:

Business check: “Search the web for [business name] in [town]. What services does it offer, which areas does it cover and how can a customer contact it? Link to your sources.”
Customer question: “Search the web for decorators serving [town] who take on interior painting in occupied homes. Suggest businesses I could contact and link to the sources for their services.”

For the second check, leave your own business name out. Choose a job you really want and an area you really cover.

Open the linked sources. Do they actually support what the answer says? Check the service area, contact details and any claim about availability or qualifications. If an answer has no usable sources, don’t count it as verified information about your business.

Save the date, exact question, answer and source links. If you find an error, correct the page that contains it when you control that page. If another site owns it, use that site’s correction process.

Keep the question when you check again so you have something to compare. Being absent once doesn’t establish that your website is blocked; being named once doesn’t promise you’ll be named for another customer.

Judge it by enquiries as well

When someone gets in touch, ask how they found you. If they say ChatGPT, ask whether it linked to your website or another page. Note that alongside the enquiry so you can see whether it led to a suitable job.

Before paying anyone to improve your visibility, ask which pages they’ll change, what evidence they’ll show you and how they’ll measure useful enquiries. Be wary of a promise that your business will always be recommended. Access checks and clearer information are concrete work; a guaranteed place in an AI answer isn’t something those changes can promise.