AEOHow to get your business named by ChatGPT in 30 days (UK, 2026)
Short answer: let the AI crawlers in, publish your prices, people and hours as data rather than design, write one page per real customer question, make your business one consistent entity everywhere, and re-test on the same prompts every month. Most UK small businesses fail the first two steps without knowing.
Week 1 · Let the crawlers in
Open your robots.txt. If it disallows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, no AI engine has ever read your site. In a January 2026 study of 100 UK small businesses, 74 were blocking at least one AI crawler and only three had any AI discovery files. Allow them, then confirm with a live fetch.
While you're there, add an /llms.txt: a plain-text page saying who you are, what you sell, where, and which pages to cite.
Week 2 · Publish your facts as data
Engines quote text. If your fee guide is a PDF, your opening hours are in an image and your treatment menu loads by script, you are invisible in exactly the places customers ask about. Put prices, hours, services and people on the page as real HTML, then mirror them in schema: LocalBusiness (or Dentist, LegalService, MedicalClinic), Offer, FAQPage and Person.
Engines will not confidently recommend what they cannot cost. Publish price bands.
Week 3 · Name your people, answer their questions
Articles bylined “the team” carry no authority. Give every practitioner a crawlable page with registration number, qualifications and specialism. Named authorship correlated with roughly four times more citations in the 2026 legal-sector audit.
Then write six answer-shaped pages, one per question your customers actually type: “How much does an implant cost in Birmingham?”, “Do I need a solicitor for probate?”. Answer in the first 60 words, add a key-takeaways box, date it, sign it.
Week 4 · One entity, then re-test
Three different addresses across Google, Companies House and your footer means no engine can resolve you as one business. Match name, address and phone everywhere. Finally, run the same 20 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, screenshot who is named, and repeat monthly. Crawler fixes show within a fortnight; consistent naming takes 8 to 12 weeks.