Why ChatGPT Recommends Your Competitor (and How to Fix It)

You type “who’s the best electrician in [your town]?” into ChatGPT, or a customer mentions they asked it, and the answer names the firm down the road. Not you.

It stings, but it is rarely random and it isn’t personal. For a question like that, ChatGPT will often search the web, turn your words into something like “best electrician [town]”, and name the businesses that the search results, “best of” lists, business listings, reviews and websites back up. So the competitor you keep seeing is usually the one with more of that evidence lying around online. Most of it is within your control. Some of it isn’t, and nobody can sell you a guaranteed spot.

This guide is for UK local business owners rather than marketers. It starts with how ChatGPT finds local businesses and how to check fairly what AI tools say about you, then works through the likely reasons a competitor gets named, with a fix for each.

How ChatGPT picks a local business

ChatGPT can answer in two ways. It can reply from what it learned during training, or it can search the web first. OpenAI’s help page on searching the web with ChatGPT says it “may search the web automatically when your question would benefit from current information”, and that it can use your location to find local results. “A good dentist near me” or “best plumber in Worcester” are the obvious candidates. That feature is what people mean by ChatGPT search: a web search run inside ChatGPT, with the answer written from what it finds.

Three details on the same OpenAI page explain a lot of what you see:

• It rewrites the question. ChatGPT uses your approximate location (from your internet connection) and may turn “good restaurants near me” into “top restaurants San Francisco”. If you’ve turned on memory, it can add your preferences too, so the search becomes “good vegan restaurants San Francisco”. Swap in your trade and town, and the question it actually goes looking for is “top [trade] [town]”.
• It uses other companies’ search results. OpenAI says ChatGPT search “sometimes partners with other search providers” and sends them the rewritten queries. It doesn’t name them on that page, though Microsoft’s privacy statement is among the partner policies it links to. A reasonable reading is that Microsoft’s Bing is one of those providers, which is why Bing deserves attention even if you never use it yourself.
• It gets local details from unnamed providers. OpenAI says ChatGPT “may share your location with trusted third-party providers that help provide more local information, such as nearby business listings”. It doesn’t say who they are. You’ll find agency blogs stating confidently that ChatGPT uses one particular listings company; they disagree with each other, and none shows OpenAI confirming it. Treat any such claim as a guess.

The same help page warns that search results and citations “can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect”. Sometimes a competitor wins simply because the AI has bad information about you, which is covered further down.

Other AI tools work from similar ingredients. Google says there is nothing special you need to do to appear in its AI Overviews and AI Mode (the AI summaries at the top of Google results, and the chat-style search mode): no special markup, no “AI text files”. Your page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in normal search. Google also says these features may run several related searches behind the scenes (“query fan-out”), and its best-practice list includes keeping your Google Business Profile up to date. Google’s Gemini assistant uses public information from Google Maps, including addresses, websites, ratings and opening hours, when it recommends places. Perplexity, another AI search tool, reads the web with its own crawler.

If you’re new to all this, our guide to what AI SEO is and how it works for local businesses covers the basics. The rest of this article assumes you’ve got a competitor problem and want to fix it.

First, check properly

Before you change anything, find out whether you have a pattern or just one annoying answer. AI recommendations change a lot from one answer to the next.

When SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai had 600 volunteers run the same kinds of prompts 2,961 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI (November to December 2025), they found less than a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of brands twice, and less than 1 in 1,000 of getting it in the same order. The study covered consumer brands and services, not local businesses specifically, but the lesson carries: one answer tells you very little. The researchers suggest measuring how often you appear across many runs instead.

A fair check looks like this:

1. Write five to ten questions a real customer would ask. Mix them up: “best [trade] in [town]”, “who’s a reliable [trade] near [area]”, “I need [specific job] in [town], who should I call?”, “[trade] in [town] with good reviews”. Use your customers’ words, not your marketing copy.
2. Always name the town. ChatGPT guesses your location from your internet connection, which can be miles out. Stating the town removes that variable.
3. Log out, or use a private window with memory off. Your own history can shape the answer, and you want to see roughly what a stranger sees.
4. Run each question more than once, in more than one tool. At minimum: ChatGPT, Google (look for an AI Overview or try AI Mode), Gemini and Perplexity. Copilot is worth a look too.
5. Write down who gets named each time, and which websites the answer cites when it shows sources. Those citations are clues to where the AI is reading.

You’re done when you have a simple tally: across all those runs, how often were you named, how often was the competitor, and which sources kept coming up? A result like “named in 2 out of 30” is something you can work with. “It didn’t mention me once when I asked” isn’t.

Save the question list. You’ll reuse it later to see whether anything has changed.

Why the competitor gets named, and the fix for each

These aren’t ranked by importance, and more than one can apply at once. None of them is certain for your case until your own check points to it. Do the robots.txt check in reason 5 first, though: it’s quick, and if your site is blocking the crawler, nothing else on this list can help until that’s fixed.

1. They show up in the “best [trade] in [town]” pages and you don’t

How to spot it: when the AI cites sources, you see local “best of” roundups, directory top-ten pages, local news stories or association listings that mention your competitor and not you.

Because ChatGPT turns the question into “top [trade] [town]”, whatever pages turn up for that kind of search become its reading list. BrightLocal’s study of 800 local searches in ChatGPT (20 US cities, run in November 2024) found the sources it cited were 58% business websites, 27% pages mentioning the business and 15% directories. That’s US data, nearly two years old, and ChatGPT has changed since. The broad picture still helps: your own site, other people’s pages about you, and directories.

The fix:

• Find the lists and directories that keep appearing in your check, and see which ones you can legitimately get onto: reputable local directories, “best of” sites that assess businesses, your trade association’s member finder.
• Earn mentions on local pages where you belong: local press, community and sponsorship pages, suppliers’ or partners’ “who we work with” pages.
• Make sure your own site has a clear page saying what you do and which towns you cover, so there’s something relevant for the AI to find when it searches “[trade] [town]”.

Keep expectations proportionate. Ahrefs found that how often a brand is mentioned around the web tracks closely with visibility in Google’s AI Overviews (a correlation of 0.65) but only weakly with ChatGPT (0.15), in a July 2025 study of the 50 most-mentioned websites. Mentions help, particularly with Google’s AI, but they aren’t the whole story for ChatGPT.

2. Their listings are complete and consistent, and yours aren’t

How to spot it: search your business name on Google Maps and Bing Maps. Is your listing there, verified, with the right categories, hours, phone number, website and photos? Do your name, address and phone number read the same on your website, Google, Bing, Facebook, Apple Maps and the main UK directories? Old addresses and phone numbers are common culprits.

Listings (sometimes called citations) are the business profiles held by Google, Bing, Apple, directories and review sites. They hold the basic facts AI tools need: who you are, where you are, when you’re open. A 2026 study by the marketing vendor SOCi, covering more than 350,000 locations belonging to 2,751 multi-location brands, found ChatGPT recommended just 1.2% of those locations, against 35.9% appearing in Google’s local “map pack”. Locations with incomplete or inconsistent listings did worse; those with consistent details across Google Maps, Facebook, their own website and other channels did better. That’s a correlation among chains and franchises, not independent businesses, so it can’t tell you exactly what will change things for you. It does line up with Google’s own guidance below.

The fix:

1. Google Business Profile (your free listing on Google Search and Maps). Claim it, verify it and fill in every field. Google’s local ranking guidance says verified, complete information helps, and that local results depend on relevance, distance and popularity. Google also lists an up-to-date Business Profile among its best practices for its AI features, and Gemini reads the same Maps data.
2. Bing Places for Business (Microsoft’s equivalent, which feeds Bing search and Bing Maps). It’s free, and Microsoft’s October 2025 relaunch lets you import your details from Google, so you don’t have to start from scratch if your Google profile is already right. Microsoft says it plans deeper links with Copilot; it hasn’t said Copilot relies on Bing Places today. Our guide to getting your business on Bing walks through the set-up.
3. Everywhere else. Apple Business (for Apple Maps), Facebook, and the directories that matter in your trade. OpenAI doesn’t publish which listings providers ChatGPT uses, and different AI tools read different sources, so the practical rule is simple: keep every major listing accurate and identical. (Yelp gets a lot of attention in US articles; OpenAI’s own help page lists Yelp reservations for the US and Canada only, so don’t prioritise it over UK directories unless your customers actually use it.)

If you’d rather hand this part over, it’s the core of our local SEO work.

3. They have more reviews, better ones, and newer ones

How to spot it: compare your Google review count, average rating and the date of your latest review with the competitor’s. To take a made-up example: if they have 150 reviews averaging 4.8 with one from last week, and you have 20 with the newest from last year, anyone comparing the two can see the gap, and Gemini reads those ratings straight from Google Maps.

The same Google guidance says plainly that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that replying to reviews helps too. In the SOCi study above, the locations ChatGPT recommended averaged 4.3 stars.

The fix:

• Ask every customer for a review, every time, and make it easy with a direct link. Asking only the happy ones breaks Google’s rules. Our guide to getting more Google reviews covers the link, the QR code and what to say.
• Reply to reviews, including the critical ones, calmly and specifically.
• Never buy reviews, write your own, offer any reward for a Google review (Google doesn’t allow incentives of any kind), or hide the bad ones. Since April 2025, UK consumer law under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has banned fake reviews, concealed incentivised reviews and false or misleading review information, and the Competition and Markets Authority’s fake reviews guidance sets out what businesses must not do. Legal risk aside, it’s the quickest way to wreck the trust you’re trying to build.

Our guide to getting more customers for your local business shows where reviews fit alongside everything else.

4. Their website says plainly what they do and where. Yours doesn’t

How to spot it: open your website as a stranger would. Can you tell within a few seconds what you do, which towns you cover, and what kinds of jobs you take on? Is that information written as text, or buried in images, sliders and PDFs? Now do the same with the competitor’s site.

Business websites were the largest share of sources in the BrightLocal study, and Google’s guidance for its AI features asks for important content to be in text. A homepage that says “Quality solutions since 1998” over a photo of a van gives an AI tool nothing to work with.

The fix:

• Write a clear page for each main service and say where you work in plain words. For a heating engineer, that might be: “We fix boilers and install central heating in Kidderminster, Bromsgrove and the surrounding villages.”
• Answer the questions customers ask you on the phone: what a typical job involves, which areas you cover, whether you do emergency call-outs, how quotes work. Write the answers the way you’d say them.
• If you or your web developer add structured data (code that labels things like your address and opening hours for search engines), make sure it matches what’s visible on the page. Google asks for that, and says no special schema is needed for its AI features.

If your site needs more than a few new pages, that’s where web design comes in.

5. Your website is blocking the AI’s search crawler

How to spot it: type your web address followed by /robots.txt into a browser (for example, yourbusiness.co.uk/robots.txt). This small file tells automated visitors, called crawlers, which parts of your site they may read. Look for a line naming OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot or Googlebot with Disallow: / beneath it, or a User-agent: * section followed by Disallow: /. Either means some or all of those crawlers are being turned away.

It’s the quickest check in this guide, and the consequence is total. OpenAI states that sites which block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”. Perplexity likewise says you need to allow PerplexityBot to appear in its results.

A common mix-up: GPTBot is a different OpenAI crawler, used to gather material for training future models. According to OpenAI it has no direct effect on whether you appear in ChatGPT search. Some businesses block GPTBot deliberately, and that’s a separate decision. Blocking OAI-SearchBot is the one that removes you from ChatGPT’s search answers.

The fix: make sure OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot and Googlebot are allowed. If you’re not comfortable editing the file, ask whoever manages your website. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to be picked up. That’s how long the crawler takes to notice, not how long until you’re recommended.

6. The AI has the wrong facts about you

How to spot it: in your check, an answer gives your old address, says you’ve closed, lists a service you don’t offer, or mixes you up with a similarly named business.

OpenAI itself warns that answers can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect. The AI is often repeating something it found, so the lasting fix is at the source.

The fix: trace the wrong detail back. Old directory entries, out-of-date listings and forgotten pages on your own site are the likely places. Correct it there, then everywhere else it appears. If the tool offers a way to flag a bad answer, use it as well, but don’t rely on that alone.

What not to do

• Fake, bought or rewarded reviews. Covered above: banned in the UK, and a trust disaster if found out.
• Publishing a “best [trade] in [town]” list that ranks yourself first. Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive has described agencies doing exactly this and seeing those names recur in ChatGPT answers. He chose not to, on the grounds that it undermines trust in the brand. Customers who click through and find you’ve crowned yourself are unlikely to be impressed.
• Paying for a promised AI ranking. Nobody can guarantee what ChatGPT will say, so treat any offer of guaranteed placement as a warning sign. If you’re weighing up outside help, our guide on how to choose an SEO agency covers the questions to ask.
• Buying special “AI files” or “AI schema” as must-haves. You may be told you need an llms.txt file or special AI markup. Google says neither is needed for its AI features. Spend the money on the fixes above first.

What you can’t control

Even with everything right, you won’t be named every time. The SparkToro research shows lists almost never repeat exactly, so aim to be named more often, not always.

Nobody can buy placement either. Google says there’s “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking” in its local results, and no one outside OpenAI decides what ChatGPT says.

The data sources aren’t public. OpenAI doesn’t say which listings providers it uses, and studies of how much Bing’s results shape ChatGPT’s answers disagree widely: Seer Interactive found 87% of citations matched Bing’s top 20 in a small early-2025 study, while a 2026 replication with 400 queries through ChatGPT’s API found about 27%. Bing plausibly matters; how much is disputed.

And there’s no reliable timetable. AI tools re-read the web on their own schedules, so anyone quoting you a set number of days or weeks until you’re recommended is guessing.

Track whether it’s working

Start by repeating your check. Every month or so, run the same questions, in the same tools, in the same way, and compare the tally with last time. The share of runs where you’re named is the number to watch, not any single answer.

Then look for ChatGPT visits in your analytics. When someone clicks through to your site from ChatGPT, OpenAI adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the link, according to its publishers FAQ. In Google Analytics, that shows up as traffic from chatgpt.com. Don’t read much into a single month; look at the trend.

If both stay flat after you’ve worked through the fixes, go back to your source notes from the check. The sites the AI keeps citing are the clearest pointer to what’s still missing.

If you’d rather have it done for you

A business owner can do everything above without outside help. If you’d rather not, this is the work we do at Get Found. We’re based in Worcester with an office in Stockport, we’ve worked in local search for 22 years, and we help businesses across the UK with AI SEO (including ChatGPT SEO), local SEO and web design, with no long contracts.

A good starting point is our free visibility audit. It includes a first AI check, and our AI visibility audit tracks it over time: we ask AI tools about your category and town and see who they name. We can’t promise that ChatGPT or any other AI tool will recommend you, and nobody honestly can. The check shows where you stand today, and the fixes in this guide are where to start.