How do you list your business on AI search?
You list your business on AI search by filling in the listings AI assistants read, with identical details, and keeping them up to date. There's no single place to apply.
When someone asks an assistant for a plumber in Melton Mowbray or an accountant who handles small limited companies, it runs a few web searches and reads the results. Map listings, directory profiles and review pages show up in those results again and again. If you're on them, with clear and matching facts, you're in the running. If you're not, the assistant has less to go on and names someone else.
Can you submit your business to ChatGPT or Gemini?
No. None of the major assistants has a sign-up form for businesses that want to be recommended. They name businesses they can find and check.
Be wary of anyone offering to "submit" you to ChatGPT for a fee. What they can do is the same work you can: get your listings right and your website clear. The one exception worth knowing about is products: OpenAI has a route for merchants to share product information for ChatGPT shopping results. That's for online shops, and it still doesn't decide who gets recommended.
Which listings matter most for AI search?
The map listings run by Google, Microsoft and Apple matter most, because they feed the search engines and apps assistants draw on. After those come directories and review sites.
- Google Business Profile: feeds Google Search and Maps, and the local results Google shows alongside its AI answers.
- Bing Places: feeds Bing, which ChatGPT search and Copilot lean on. Plenty of businesses have never claimed theirs.
- Apple Business Connect: controls how you appear in Apple Maps and Siri.
- Directories in your sector: for agencies that's Clutch and similar sites. For trades it's sites like Checkatrade. Most professions have one.
- Review sites: Trustpilot and the reviews on your Google profile. Reviews decide close calls.
What details should every listing have?
The same core facts, in the same words, on every listing. Assistants cross-check sources, and mismatches make you look like several businesses, or none.
- Business name, spelled exactly as it is on your website.
- Address and postcode, in one format. If you serve customers at their location, the areas you cover.
- One main phone number and your website address.
- A short description of what you do and who for, reused word for word.
- Your main services, named the way customers say them.
- Opening hours, kept current, including holidays.
- The right primary category, which matters more than most people think.
What order should you set your listings up in?
Work through these steps in order. Most small businesses can do the first five in a day.
- Write your master details once: name, address, phone, website, a one-line description, services, areas and hours. Every listing copies from this.
- Claim or create your Google Business Profile, pick the right primary category, and add services, photos and hours.
- Claim Bing Places. You can import from your Google profile, then check every field.
- Claim Apple Business Connect and check your Apple Maps listing.
- Search your business name and note every existing listing. Fix old addresses, old numbers and duplicates.
- Join the two or three directories that matter in your sector. Fill in every field, not just the required ones.
- Ask recent customers for reviews on your Google profile and your main directory.
- Check your website says the same thing, with your details in plain text and matching schema.
- Run your buyers' questions in the main assistants, look at the sources they cite, and add any listing you're missing.
Do you need to be on every directory?
No. A handful of complete, accurate listings is worth more than dozens of thin ones. Low-quality directories add little and are hard to keep up to date.
The test is simple: does the directory show up when you search for your service, and do assistants cite it? If yes, be on it. If it only exists to sell listings, skip it. Our guide to the directories ChatGPT uses covers the UK ones we see cited.
How long before listings show up in AI answers?
There's no fixed timeline. New and corrected listings can be picked up when the search engines next crawl them. Being named regularly takes longer, because reviews and mentions build up over months.
That's why we track the same buyer questions every month, rather than checking once and giving up.