Why your business does not appear in ChatGPT answers, and how to fix it

Try this now. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity, and ask the question a potential customer would ask. Not your company name, the actual buying question: “who does commercial roofing in Leeds”, “best accountants for freelancers”, “who can build a website for a dental practice”.

If a competitor is named and you are not, there is a reason. Usually a boring one.

Here are the six causes we see, roughly in order of frequency, with how to diagnose and fix each.

1. You are blocking the crawlers

This is the most common, and the most quietly infuriating, because almost nobody chose it.

AI companies crawl the web with named bots: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (Google’s AI products), CCBot (Common Crawl, which feeds many models). A great many websites block some or all of these, because a security plugin added a rule, a hosting provider set a default, or someone copied a robots.txt from an article in 2023 recommending exactly that.

How to check: go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. Look for any of those bot names next to Disallow. Also look for a blanket User-agent: * with Disallow: /, which blocks everything.

How to fix: decide deliberately, then write it down explicitly. If you want AI assistants to be able to recommend you, allow them. Our own robots.txt allows them by name, with a comment explaining that it is intentional.

A caution: some businesses genuinely do want to block AI crawlers, usually publishers whose content is the product. That is a legitimate position. Just make it a decision rather than an accident.

2. Your content is not readable as text

Crawlers read HTML. They do not watch your video, read text baked into a JPEG, or reliably wait for a JavaScript widget to render before extracting content.

Sites commonly hide their most important information in exactly these places. Prices inside a designed image. Services in a carousel. Opening hours in a graphic. The entire “about” story in a video with no transcript.

How to check: open your site, press Ctrl+U or Cmd+Option+U to view source, and search for a key fact, your price, your main service, your location. If it is not in there as text, a crawler probably cannot see it.

How to fix: put your facts in real HTML text. Keep the beautiful image if you like, but the information has to exist in text as well.

3. Your pages contain opinions, not facts

This is the one people find hardest to hear, because it is about the copy someone paid for.

Read your homepage as if you were a machine trying to extract a quotable claim. “Industry-leading”. “Bespoke solutions”. “Passionate about quality”. “Trusted by businesses across the region.”

None of that can be quoted. A model cannot repeat “industry-leading” as a fact, because it is not one. It has nothing to verify and nothing to attribute.

Now compare: “we build custom websites for £2,200”, “live within 30 working days”, “we work with clients in 14 countries”, “founded in 2019”. Each of those is a discrete, checkable statement that can be lifted into an answer.

How to fix: go through every page and, for each vague claim, write the specific fact underneath it. Then delete the vague claim and keep the fact. If you cannot produce the fact, that tells you something worth knowing.

4. Nothing corroborates you

Models weigh consistency across sources. A claim that appears only on your own website is weaker than one that appears on your website, your Google Business Profile, a directory, a review platform and a news mention.

This is not about link building in the old SEO sense. It is about being verifiably real.

How to check: search your business name and see what exists beyond your own site. If the answer is very little, that is the gap.

How to fix: claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Make sure your name, description and contact details are identical everywhere they appear, because inconsistency actively hurts. Get listed in the credible directories for your industry. Ask satisfied customers for reviews on platforms that are publicly readable.

Consistency matters more than volume here. Three sources saying the same thing beats ten saying slightly different things.

5. Your site is slow, broken, or structurally confusing

Crawl budget is real. If your site is slow, returns errors, redirects in chains or buries pages five clicks deep with no sitemap, it gets crawled less thoroughly and indexed less completely.

There is also a simpler version of this problem: if your site is genuinely unpleasant to use, the signals that flow from that affect everything downstream.

How to check: run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights. Look at Search Console for crawl errors and coverage gaps. Check that yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml exists and is current.

How to fix: this is the most technical item on the list and the hardest to do piecemeal. Compress your images, which is nearly always the biggest single win. Remove scripts you are not using. If the site is built on a heavily plugged-in platform and has become slow beyond rescue, rebuilding may genuinely be cheaper than continuing to patch it.

6. You are not actually the answer

Worth including honestly, because sometimes this is the real reason.

If someone asks for “the cheapest option” and you are the premium one, you should not be named, and you would not want to be. If they ask about a service adjacent to yours rather than yours, the same applies.

How to check: try several phrasings of the question, including ones that match what you genuinely offer. If you appear for the accurate questions and not the mismatched ones, the system is working correctly.

How to fix: nothing to fix. Make sure your site is unambiguous about what you do and who you are for, then compete for the questions you can actually answer.

A sensible order to work through this

If you want a plan rather than a list:

1. Check robots.txt today. Two minutes, and it can invalidate everything else.
2. Read your source for your key facts. Another ten minutes.
3. Rewrite your homepage and top service pages around facts. An afternoon, and free.
4. Add structured data. A developer job, and the highest-leverage technical change available.
5. Fix your Google Business Profile and directory listings. A morning.
6. Then look at speed and structure. The largest job, and the one most likely to need help.

Steps one to three cost nothing but attention, and they resolve a meaningful proportion of cases on their own.

If you would rather someone else looked

We do a free written visibility audit that works through exactly this list for your site: crawler access, machine-readable content, structured data, corroboration and speed. You get a report in plain English with the fixes ranked by what they are worth.

It is free, it takes about two business days, and you do not have to sit through a call to receive it. Plenty of people take the report, fix things themselves, and we never hear from them again. That is a perfectly good outcome.