What does AI actually say about your business, and how do you check?
You can find out this afternoon, for nothing, in about an hour. Here is the check we run, what a wrong answer usually looks like, and the problem we found on four of the 77 UK service business sites we tested that no owner would ever spot on their own.
Ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Copilot and Gemini the questions your customers ask, three times each, and write down what comes back. Answers vary wildly: SparkToro found under a 1 in 100 chance of the same list of businesses coming back twice. We tested 77 UK service business sites and four were refusing OpenAI's reader at the server, with nothing in the file owners are told to check.
Why does it matter what an AI says about you?
Because a growing share of the people looking for someone in your trade never reach your website at all. They read a summary of you instead, written by something you have never met, and they decide from that.
Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, reported in December 2025 that about 30% of searches now show an AI summary, and 53% of UK adults say they see these summaries often. Ordinary Google search has not gone anywhere: 82% of UK adults still use it.1
The behaviour behind that shift is harder to measure in the UK. The best recent figures come from BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey, published on 10 March 2026, which found that 45% of consumers had used an AI tool to find a local business, up from 6% a year earlier, with 31% doing it at least monthly. Reassuringly, 88% of those AI users then went and checked the recommendation themselves.2
That survey asked 1,002 US adults, not UK ones, and no UK equivalent exists for service businesses. Treat the direction of travel as real and the exact percentage as American.
Here is the awkward part. None of this shows up in any report you have access to. There is no log of the times an AI described your business to someone and got it wrong, and no notification when it stops mentioning you. The only way to know is to go and look.
What should you ask, and where?
Ask the questions a customer would ask, not the questions you would ask about yourself. This is where most owners get a falsely comforting result.
Typing your own business name is the natural first move, and it tells you very little, because you have just handed the AI the answer. What matters is whether you come up when nobody mentions you at all.
Ask in four places: ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini. Use a fresh chat each time, signed out or in a private window, so the answer is not leaning on your own history.
| Kind of question | What to type | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Nobody names you | Who are the best [your trade] in [your town]? | Whether you get named at all without help |
| A real problem | My boiler is leaking in [your town], who should I call? | Whether you come up when someone describes a job rather than a trade |
| With a condition attached | Most reliable [your trade] near [your postcode] | Which adjectives the AI attaches to you, if any |
| Named directly | Tell me about [your business name] | What it believes about you, in its own words |
| Your details | What are [your business name]'s opening hours and phone number? | Whether the facts are current |
| Your range | Does [your business name] do [a service you really offer]? | Whether your work is understood or under-described |
| Your patch | Does [your business name] cover [a town you really cover]? | Whether your service area is right |
| Head to head | [Your business name] or [a local competitor], which is better? | What is said about you when you are compared |
Write down every answer with the date, or screenshot it. You are building a before, and in three months you will want something to compare against.
Why does one answer tell you nothing?
Because the same question, asked twice, gives you different businesses. This is the single most useful thing to understand before you draw any conclusion at all.
SparkToro published research on 28 January 2026 in which 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI a combined 2,961 times, over November and December 2025. They found less than a 1 in 100 chance that the same list of brands would come back twice, and less than 1 in 1,000 that it would come back in the same order.3
Two honest caveats. The authors say plainly that they are not credentialed researchers and have asked for the work to be replicated properly, and they tested brands and products in general rather than plumbers and dental practices. Nobody has run this on UK local services.
Less than a 1 in 100 chance that the same question returns the same list of businesses twice, across 2,961 runs. So if you check once and you are missing, you have not learned anything yet.
The practical consequence is that a single check is worthless and three checks are worth quite a lot. Ask each question three times in three fresh chats, then count how many times out of three you were named. Two out of three is a real signal. Zero out of nine, across three questions, is a problem worth chasing.
Ignore your position in the list entirely. Any tool selling you a ranking position in an AI answer is selling you a number that changed while you were reading it.
Write your questions
Take the eight above and fill in your trade, town and postcode. Four with your name, four without.
Ask three times each
A fresh chat every time, in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Copilot and Gemini. Signed out if you can.
Count, do not rank
Record how many times out of three you were named. Ignore whether you were first or fourth.
Note anything false
Wrong hours, an old number, a service you dropped, a town you do not cover, or another business mistaken for yours.
What does a wrong answer actually look like?
Rarely an outright invention. Far more often it is a real fact about somebody else, or a true fact about you from three years ago, delivered with total confidence and no hedging.
The largest study of AI accuracy so far was run by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC and published on 22 October 2025. Twenty-two public service broadcasters in 18 countries, working in 14 languages, assessed more than 3,000 answers from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity. 45% of the answers had at least one significant problem. 31% had serious sourcing problems, meaning missing, misleading or wrongly attributed sources, and 20% had major accuracy problems including invented details and out-of-date information. Gemini was the worst performer, with significant issues in 76% of its responses.4
That study is about news coverage, and the difference matters: a question about a plumber in Leeds is not the same task as a question about a general election. No equivalent exists for UK local services, so nobody knows the error rate for your business.
What does transfer is the shape of the failure. The commonest problem was not making things up, it was attaching information to the wrong source. Scaled down to your business, that is your predecessor's opening hours, a phone number a directory never updated, or a company with a similar name two counties away whose reviews have quietly become yours.
What we found on 77 UK service business websites
The commonest reason an AI knows nothing about you is not that it read your website and was unimpressed. It is that it never got in, and the one file you would check to find that out says everything is fine.
We wanted to know how often that actually happens, so on 22 August 2026 we tested it. We took 77 independent UK service business websites across twelve trades and eleven towns: plumbers, electricians, roofers, heating engineers, dentists, physiotherapists, vets, solicitors, accountants, garages, landscapers and wedding photographers, in Leeds, Bristol, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, Cardiff, Norwich, Southampton, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Leicester. No partner sites and no clients, just businesses found the way a customer would find them.
We asked each home page for a copy five times over, changing only the name our request gave when it knocked: an ordinary Chrome browser, Google's search reader, then the automated readers used by ChatGPT and Perplexity. We repeated the whole thing three times to rule out a bad minute on somebody's server.
In robots.txt, the small file at the top of nearly every website that tells automated visitors what they are allowed to look at, 1 site out of 77 asked AI readers to stay away. That is the file every article on this subject tells owners to check, and by that measure almost nobody is blocking anything.
At the server, the picture was different. Four sites out of 77 refused the request outright when it announced itself as OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI's automated reader, while serving the identical request normally when it claimed to be a browser or Google. Same refusal on all three rounds, so not a fluke. Six sites out of 77 did the same to GPTBot, OpenAI's other reader.5
That matters because OpenAI states it plainly in their own documentation for site owners: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." They go on to recommend allowing it.6
Now the part that should bother you. Three of those four sites had a robots.txt that welcomed every reader in. The owner, or anyone advising them, would open that file, see an open door and conclude there was no problem. The refusal was coming from the software serving the pages: two were running LiteSpeed and one Apache. Nobody typed a decision to exclude ChatGPT. It is the kind of default a hosting company can switch on across every site it runs without telling anyone.
What their robots.txt said
- Every automated reader welcome
- No AI reader named or excluded
- At most, the admin login area kept private
- Nothing an owner would think twice about
What their server actually did
- Refused OpenAI's ChatGPT reader with an error
- Served Google's reader normally
- Served an ordinary browser normally
- Same result on all three attempts
The one site that had genuinely chosen to block got it wrong in the other direction. Its robots.txt named eight AI readers and shut them all out, but OAI-SearchBot was not on that list, so by the file's own terms ChatGPT was welcome. Its security layer refused it anyway.
What this does not prove: we sent the reader's name, not traffic from OpenAI's own network, and the real reader arrives from published OpenAI addresses that could be treated differently. Seventy-seven sites is a sample and not a census, on one afternoon in August. What it does show is narrower and still worth an email to your host: these sites treat a visitor claiming to be an AI reader differently from one claiming to be a browser, and that decision is nowhere in the file anyone would tell you to check.
Where does the answer about you come from?
From what is already published about you in several places, not from your website alone. This is why a wrong answer is usually a wrong record somewhere, and why it is fixable.
Four inputs matter. Your own website, assuming it can be read. Your Google Business Profile. The directories that still carry your details. And everything else written about you: reviews, local press, trade body pages, a forum thread where someone recommended you in 2019.
Google's own guidance is direct about the second one, saying that using Google Business Profiles helps your products and services "be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results".9
That record can change without you touching it. Google's help documentation for business owners says: "If we receive reports that your business info isn't accurate, we might update your profile."7 Your opening hours can change because a stranger suggested a correction and Google believed them. If you have not logged in for a year, that alone is worth ten minutes.
How do you correct the record?
In four places, in this order. None of them costs anything, and you can do all four in a morning.
Start with your Google Business Profile. Sign in and check the trading name, phone number, address or service area, opening hours, services and description. Correct anything stale, then look for the alert Google shows when it has changed something itself. Edits are usually reviewed in about 10 minutes, though Google says it can take up to 30 days, and a rejected edit can sometimes be appealed.7
Then claim your Bing listing. Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing, so this is not really about Bing's own traffic. Microsoft moved the free listing tool to bing.com/forbusiness in October 2025.8 Claiming it takes a few minutes and most owners never have.
Then your own website. Put the facts on the page in ordinary readable text, not only in an image or a contact form: trading name, phone number, address or the towns you cover, opening hours, and the services you actually do. Then ask whoever hosts your site one specific question: are requests from OpenAI's readers, OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot, being refused by our security settings? Robots.txt will not answer that, and your host or developer is the person who can.
Then everywhere else. Search your own phone number, and your old one. Stale directory entries, a trade body page listing a number from two phones ago, a Facebook page you forgot you made. Each is a record something might read back to a customer.
All of that is genuinely doable yourself, in an afternoon, for nothing, and most owners who run it find one or two things to fix and can then leave it alone for a quarter. It stops being a kitchen-table job only if the problem turns out to be that requests are refused before anything is read.
Frontpage AI is a UK studio that builds and manages websites for independent service businesses, structured so that Google and AI answer engines can read, trust and name them. We work only with UK service businesses such as trades, clinics, salons and instructors, and charge from £88 per month on a 30 day rolling contract with no setup fee. The check in this article is the first thing we run on any site, and seeing that refusal pattern more than once is what prompted us to test 77 of them properly. More on how we approach being found by AI, or the numbers on partner sites.
What is not worth your time?
Most of what is currently sold as AI optimisation, at least according to the company that runs the largest AI search surface in the country.
Google's guidance for site owners, last updated on 10 July 2026, takes the popular tactics one by one.9 On the special text files sold as an AI requirement: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search", and keeping one "will neither harm nor help your site's visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them." On breaking pages into small pieces: "There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it." On the hidden code that spells out your facts for machines: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." And on paying for mentions around the web: "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem."
Read that for what it is. Google is describing Google, authoritatively, and describing nothing else. OpenAI and Perplexity have published nothing equivalent, so anyone claiming to know what ChatGPT rewards is inferring, not quoting.
For consistency, we should say this site publishes one of those files. Google ignores it, by their own account. We keep it because other services read it and it costs nothing, which is the honest reason rather than a claim that it earns us anything.
The work that does hold up is duller. Correct records in the places that hold them, facts written plainly on a page that can actually be reached, and a real reason for anyone to mention you. That last one is the hard part, and no file at the top of your website substitutes for it.
- Ofcom found that about 30% of searches now show an AI summary and 53% of UK adults say they often see them, so a growing share of customers read a description of your business before they read your website.
- Ask each question three times in fresh chats, because SparkToro found less than a 1 in 100 chance of the same list of businesses coming back twice across 2,961 runs. Count how often you are named and ignore your position in the list.
- In more than 3,000 AI answers about the news assessed by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, 45% had at least one significant problem, and sourcing failures at 31% were more common than factual errors at 20%. No equivalent study of UK local businesses exists.
- Frontpage AI tested 77 independent UK service business websites on 22 August 2026. One declared a block on AI readers in robots.txt, but four refused OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot at the server, and three of those four had a robots.txt that welcomed every reader in.
- OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, so checking that your host is not refusing it is worth one email.
- Google's guidance, last updated 10 July 2026, says llms.txt files, chunking content and special schema markup are not required for its AI features, and that Google Search ignores such files entirely.
Common questions
How often should I check what AI says about my business?
Once a quarter is enough for most independent service businesses. Check sooner if you change your phone number, move premises, change your opening hours, add or drop a service, or take over a business that traded under another name. Those are the moments when the records the AI reads go out of date.
Why does ChatGPT name a competitor instead of me?
Often it is chance rather than judgement. SparkToro ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI a combined 2,961 times in November and December 2025 and found less than a 1 in 100 chance of the same list of brands coming back twice. Ask the same question three times before you conclude anything. If you are missing from all three, that is worth investigating.
Can I stop an AI saying something wrong about my business?
Not directly. There is no button that edits an AI answer. What you can change is the records it reads: your Google Business Profile, your Bing listing, your own website, and the directories that still carry old details about you. Correct those and the answers tend to follow, though not immediately.
How do I know if my website is blocking AI crawlers?
Looking at your robots.txt file is not enough. In our test of 77 UK service business websites on 22 August 2026, four refused a request that identified itself as OpenAI's reader while serving a browser and Google normally, and three of those four had a robots.txt that welcomed every reader in. Ask whoever hosts your site to confirm that requests from OpenAI's readers are not being refused by your security settings.
Do I need an llms.txt file to appear in AI answers?
Not for Google. Google's own guidance, last updated on 10 July 2026, says you do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown to appear in Google Search including its AI features, and that maintaining such files will neither harm nor help your visibility there because Google Search ignores them. Other services may read them, but no one should sell you one as a ranking lever.
Does having a Bing listing matter if nobody uses Bing?
Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing, so a Bing listing is not really about Bing's own search traffic. Microsoft moved the free listing tool from bingplaces.com to bing.com/forbusiness in October 2025. Claiming it takes a few minutes and most independent UK service businesses have never done it.
Sources
Every figure above was checked against the original publication rather than a summary of it. Where a study is not UK based, we have said so in the text.
- From apps to AI search: how the UK goes online in 2025. Ofcom, 10 December 2025. UK regulator research on how UK adults use search and AI tools.
- Half of consumers are asking AI for business recommendations. BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, 10 March 2026. Survey of 1,002 US adult consumers, of whom 455 were AI users. US only, and BrightLocal sells local marketing software.
- AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products. SparkToro, 28 January 2026. 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI a combined 2,961 times during November and December 2025. The authors state they are not credentialed researchers and ask for peer review.
- News Integrity in AI Assistants. European Broadcasting Union and BBC, 22 October 2025. More than 3,000 answers assessed by 22 public service media organisations across 18 countries and 14 languages. Covers news answers, not local business answers.
- Crawler-access test of 77 UK service business websites. Frontpage AI, first-party, 22 August 2026. 77 independent UK service business sites across 12 trades and 11 towns. Each home page requested under five different visitor identities, repeated three times. Identity was declared in the request rather than sent from the crawler operators' own networks, which is stated as a limitation in the text.
- Overview of OpenAI Crawlers. OpenAI developer documentation, checked 22 August 2026. OpenAI's own statement of what each of its automated readers does.
- Understand what happens to your Business Profile edits. Google Business Profile Help, checked 22 August 2026. Google's own documentation for business owners.
- Introducing the New Bing Places for Business. Microsoft Bing blog, 3 October 2025. Microsoft's own announcement of the move to bing.com/forbusiness.
- Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. Google Search Central, last updated 10 July 2026. Authoritative on Google's own AI features and on nothing else.
Published 22 August 2026. Last checked against sources on 22 August 2026. We update this page when the underlying figures are revised.