Measured, not advertised

Why ChatGPT does not recommend your business

Almost always because your website cannot answer the question the assistant is trying to answer. On 7 November 2026 we tested thirteen real business websites and none of them blocked the ChatGPT search crawler. The problem is not that they are shut out. It is that when the crawler arrives, there is nothing on the page an assistant can use to recommend them.

If a customer asks an assistant for a plumber, the assistant has to find out who does that work, in that area, at what price, and when they are available. If your site does not say those things in a form a machine can read, the assistant has nothing to work with — no matter how good your business is.

The test we ran

On 7 November 2026 we fetched the robots.txt file of thirteen real business websites — eight trades and home-services companies, plus five well-known consumer brands for comparison — and checked whether each one told the ChatGPT search crawler to stay away.

This matters because of what OpenAI documents about that crawler. In OpenAI’s overview of its crawlers, OAI-SearchBot is described as the crawler “used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”, and the documentation states plainly that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while still possibly appearing as navigational links.

Zero of thirteen blocked it. Being blocked is not why an assistant fails to recommend these businesses. That assumption is the most expensive one a business owner can hold, because it leads to chasing a problem that is not there.

So what is actually missing?

Reachable is not the same as usable. We ran the same seven trades websites through our scanner — the tool that reads a public homepage the way an automated assistant does — and looked at which facts an assistant could not find.

• 3 of 5 readable sites could not tell an assistant their prices or call-out fee.
• 2 of 5 did not state the area they serve.
• 2 of 5 did not give an address or directions.

Those three facts are exactly what a customer asks about before they hire anyone. An assistant cannot invent them. If no site can answer, the assistant recommends a business that did — and it will not be yours.

Recorded honestly: two of the seven trades sites could not be read at all, and one was read as a general business rather than a trades business. We report those as they are rather than counting them as failures. A certification authority that rounds its own measurements in its favour is worth nothing.

What Google says about appearing in its AI answers

Google’s position is narrower than most people expect. In its guidance for AI features and your website, Google states that to be eligible to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet — and that there are no additional technical requirements. It also lists making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page, and that important content is available in textual form.

Translation for a business owner: there is no separate AI switch to flip. If your site says what it does, where, and for how much — in text a machine can read — then the assistants have something to work with. If it does not, no amount of optimisation creates those facts.

What to do about it

1. 1. Find out what is missing. Run the free scan. It tells you the kind of business it reads you as, and which facts an assistant could not find. Most owners find two or three things, and they are usually the same ones above.
2. 2. Publish the plain facts. Your prices or how a quote is priced. The towns or radius you serve. Your hours, and how to reach you. These are things you already know — they are just not on the page in a readable form.
3. 3. Get it verified. When the facts are readable, certification is free. You paste one line of code, we re-check the live page, and you get a certificate and a badge that anyone — a customer or an assistant — can verify.

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