Why Isn’t My Business Showing Up in ChatGPT?

You’ve spent years building your business’s reputation.

You’ve invested in a brilliant website, worked your way up Google and published enough articles to fill a small library.

Then someone asks ChatGPT to recommend businesses in your industry.

And apparently, you don’t exist.

You’re nowhere to be seen, not even a tiniest mention.

Before you call an emergency marketing meeting and start pointing fingers, there’s something we should probably clear up.

Being brilliant at what you do and being easy to find aren’t necessarily the same thing.

We call the distance between the two the Visibility Gap.

And AI search is exposing a problem many established businesses already had: the internet doesn’t necessarily have an accurate picture of what they’ve become.

Your business might have grown, developed new services or built a team of specialists. But if your online presence is still telling the story of the business you were five years ago, how is anyone supposed to know?

Including ChatGPT.

So, how do you make your business easier to find?

First, how does ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend?

Now, here’s where things get interesting.

Ask ChatGPT about a business by name, and it might be able to tell you all sorts about it.

But ask it to recommend businesses that solve a particular problem? That’s a different kettle of fish.

Take these two questions:

“Tell me about Cyan Solutions.”

“Which UK IT consultancies could help our growing business improve its cybersecurity?”

The first person already knows who they’re looking for.

The second hasn’t got a clue who to choose yet.

And that’s exactly where you’d quite like your business to get a mention.

ChatGPT can use web search and other available information to help answer those questions. But there’s no magic trick that’ll guarantee your place on the list.

There are, however, a few things worth checking.

1. Make sure ChatGPT can actually access your website

First things first. Can ChatGPT actually get through the front door?

OpenAI uses something called OAI-SearchBot to discover websites for ChatGPT search.

Think of it as a little digital visitor trying to have a nose around your website.

The problem? Your website’s security settings or robots.txt file might be telling it to clear off.

Not particularly helpful when you’re trying to get noticed.

Give this a go: Ask whoever looks after your website to check whether OAI-SearchBot is allowed to access your public pages.

It won’t guarantee you a recommendation, but at least you’ll know you’re not accidentally turning away potential visitors before they’ve even got inside.

2. Stop making people guess what your business does

Some businesses could win an Olympic medal for talking about themselves without actually saying anything.

“We deliver innovative, future-focused solutions that empower transformation.”

So what do you actually do?

If you’re an IT consultancy specialising in cybersecurity for growing businesses, cut to the chase and say that. Don’t send people on a wild goose hunt through three pages of corporate waffle.

And if your business has grown, expanded into new markets or developed new specialisms, make sure your website hasn’t missed the memo.

Because ChatGPT can only work with the information available to it.

If your website’s still describing the business you were five years ago, you’re hardly giving it the clearest picture of what you do today.

And if that’s sounding uncomfortably familiar, it might be worth looking at whether your website has kept up with your business in the first place.

Give this a go: Read your homepage and main service pages with fresh eyes. Could a complete stranger tell you what you do, who you help and what you’re particularly good at?

If not, you might have found something worth sorting.

3. Give people something worth referencing

The internet is absolutely bursting with businesses telling everyone how brilliant they are.

Industry-leading this. Award-winning that. Passionate about excellence, obviously.

Very impressive. But where’s the proof?

If you want people to understand what makes your business worth choosing, give them something to get their teeth into.

Proper case studies. Interesting research. Specialist advice. Real examples of problems you’ve solved.

Not just another paragraph about how committed you are to delivering outstanding results.

Take our work with Cyan Solutions, an established IT consultancy.

The expertise was already there. Cyan certainly wasn’t short of people who knew their stuff.

The website just needed to do a better job of showing it.

So we gave its services a clearer structure, made its expertise easier to explore and helped visitors get a much better picture of what the business could deliver.

And the result? 158% more contact form submissions in the first 90 days after launch, compared with the same period the previous year.

Now, we’re not claiming ChatGPT suddenly fell head over heels for Cyan.

That wasn’t what we were measuring.

But making its expertise easier to find and understand clearly had value.

And when AI tools are trying to work out which businesses might be relevant, having your best bits hidden away isn’t exactly helping.

4. What does the rest of the internet say about you?

Of course your website thinks you’re brilliant.

It’s hardly going to say you’re a bit average and everyone should probably look elsewhere.

But what does the rest of the internet think?

Are people mentioning your business in industry publications? Are customers leaving reviews? Are your specialists sharing the sort of knowledge that makes people sit up and take notice?

And don’t underestimate the people you’ve already got. Your team’s experience could be one of the most interesting things about your business, particularly when you give them a chance to share it.

Because if you’ve got decades of experience but nobody outside your own website seems to know about it, you’re not giving people much to go on.

And potentially, AI tools either.

There’s probably an awful lot happening inside your business that the outside world would find interesting.

So let some of it out.

Share your thinking. Get involved in industry conversations. Give people a reason to mention your name.

Because quietly being brilliant behind the scenes isn’t much use if nobody outside the office knows about it.

5. Stop guessing. Have a proper look.

Fancy seeing what ChatGPT thinks of your industry?

Go on, have a nose.

Ask it to recommend businesses that do what you do.

But here’s the catch. You’re not allowed to mention your own company name. That’s cheating.

Ask the questions your customers might genuinely ask, including their problems, industries and locations. Then see who gets a mention.

Your biggest competitor? That business you keep seeing everywhere? Someone you’ve never even heard of?

Have a look at any sources ChatGPT references and see whether there’s a pattern.

Just remember, one missing mention doesn’t mean you’ve been permanently banished from AI search.

Answers change, so try different questions over time and see what you uncover.

And if you’re finding some rather large gaps, there’s probably a wider conversation to have about your SEO and how easily people can discover your business in the first place.

The Visibility Gap just got a little bigger

Just when everyone was getting the hang of Google, along comes ChatGPT has thrown a spanner in the works. 

But while all that’s been happening, your business has been moving along too. You’ve most likely grown leaps and bounds, taken on bigger projects and mastered services you didn’t even offer a few years ago. The big questions are.

Does the outside world know about any of it?

And has the internet’s understanding of you kept up?

Being found matters. So does being understood, remembered and trusted.

And the better those things work together, the clearer a picture people can build of your business.

At Giant Peach, we bring strategy, branding, website design and marketing together to help established businesses make more of what they’ve built.

Because being brilliant behind the scenes is all well and good. It’d be a shame if nobody knew quite how brilliant.

Fancy a fresh pair of eyes? Let’s have a chat.