Get Your Business Recommended by AI | North Hertfordshire Local Guide
A mate of mine runs a skip hire company in Stevenage. Good bloke. Been doing it fifteen years. Solid reputation. The kind of business where everyone locally knows his name but his website is, and I say this with love, absolutely terrible.
I asked ChatGPT to recommend a skip hire company near Stevenage.
It recommended three businesses. None of them were his.
Two of them started in the last four years. One of them he's personally lent equipment to because they didn't have enough kit. And yet AI picked them over him. He was furious. I told him it wasn't personal. It's just that those other businesses had given AI something to work with. His hadn't.
That conversation is basically why this post exists.
AI recommendation isn't about being the best
Sounds wrong, doesn't it? But it's true, at least right now.
The businesses that AI recommends in North Hertfordshire aren't necessarily the ones that have been around the longest, or do the best work, or have the most experience. They're the ones that have made it easiest for AI to find, understand, and trust them.
And that's actually good news if you're willing to put in some effort. Because it means you can influence this. You're not at the mercy of some algorithm you can't control. You just need to understand what AI is looking for when someone asks it to recommend a business.
Be findable in more than one place
This is so obvious that I feel daft writing it. But I'll write it anyway because the number of local businesses I've audited who only exist on their own website...
Forty percent. Maybe higher. Depending on the trade.
AI cross-references information from multiple sources before it feels confident enough to recommend someone. Your website is one source. Your Google Business Profile is another. Directory listings are another. Review platforms. Social media profiles. Local blog mentions. Each one is a signal that says "yes, this business exists, yes, they do what they say they do, yes, they're where they say they are."
A joiner in Baldock I worked with had a decent website and literally nothing else. No Google Business Profile (he'd started one in 2021 and never verified it). No Checkatrade. No Yell. Nothing. We got all of that set up over a couple of weeks with consistent information everywhere. Same name. Same number. Same address. Within about six weeks, Perplexity started mentioning him for joinery queries in the Baldock area. ChatGPT followed shortly after.
Six weeks. From invisible to recommended. Not because he changed anything about how he works. Just because he made himself findable.
Your website has to do a specific job
Right, here's where most people go wrong.
Your website is probably designed to look good and make a decent first impression on someone who lands on it. That's fine. But AI doesn't land on your website to admire the colour scheme. It's there for information. Very specific information.
When someone asks "who does bathroom fitting in Letchworth?", the AI scans the web looking for content that says, clearly and explicitly, something like "we fit bathrooms in Letchworth." If your website says "we provide bathroom installation services across Hertfordshire" without naming Letchworth specifically... you might get skipped.
I keep saying this to people and they keep thinking I'm exaggerating. I'm not.
Name the towns. Every service page should mention the specific places you actually work. Hitchin. Baldock. Royston. Stevenage. Letchworth. St Albans. Whatever your patch is, spell it out. We wrote about this in our post on structuring your website for AI search visibility if you want the detail.
Google Business Profile is doing heavy lifting you don't realise
I could talk about this for hours. (I have a whole post about why Google Business Profile matters for AI search if you want the full version.)
Short version: Gemini pulls directly from your profile. ChatGPT and Perplexity cross-reference it. If your profile is bare, AI has less to work with. If it's complete, detailed, regularly updated, and full of reviews, AI has loads to work with.
Most people set their Google Business Profile up years ago, picked a category, added their phone number, and never touched it again.
That's not going to cut it.
Fill in your services properly. Upload photos of actual work you've done. Post something every month (even just a quick project update). Respond to every review. Keep your opening hours current. It's boring. It takes maybe ten minutes a month. And it makes a genuine difference to whether AI recommends you or not.
Reviews are a currency you're probably not collecting
A dentist in Hitchin I spoke to had six Google reviews. Six. She'd been practising for twelve years. Her competitor down the road, who'd been open for three, had seventy-eight reviews.
Guess who AI recommends when someone asks for a dentist in Hitchin.
Seventy-eight reviews doesn't mean that dentist is better. It means they asked for reviews and kept asking. They probably send an automated text or email after every appointment with a direct link to their Google review page. Dead simple. But most businesses don't do it because it feels a bit awkward.
Get over the awkwardness. Reviews compound. Every new review makes the next recommendation more likely. And it's not just the volume. What people actually write in reviews matters too. "Fitted new kitchen in our house in Royston, brilliant job, really tidy" tells AI something useful. It tells it where you work, what you do, and that you're good at it. We've got more on this in our post about how reviews help AI recommend your business.
Get yourself mentioned elsewhere
This one's the sleeper. Nobody thinks about it. But it matters.
If a local blog mentions your business. If a community group's website lists you as a sponsor. If a Hertfordshire business directory has your details. Each of those is another data point that AI can use to confirm you're a real, active, credible business.
Some of this you can do yourself. Get listed on Checkatrade, Bark, Yell, Thomson Local. Sponsor a local football team and ask them to put your name and link on their website. Write a guest piece for a community site if you can stomach it.
And some of it happens naturally over time if you're doing everything else right. But you can speed it up. Every mention helps.
FAQ pages are doing something most people don't realise
Bit of a tangent but I want to talk about this because it's genuinely one of the easiest wins available.
When someone asks ChatGPT a question, it looks for pages on the internet that already contain that question with a clear answer. It's not being creative. It's finding existing answers to the question being asked.
If your website has a FAQ page with fifteen real questions and honest answers, you've just given AI fifteen different reasons to recommend you.
"How much does a fence cost in Baldock?" "Do you do free quotes?" "How long does a kitchen installation take?" "Can you work on listed buildings?"
Write the questions. Write the answers. Put them on your site. Half an hour of work. We've written about how to write FAQs that ChatGPT actually uses with more specific guidance.
Most of your competitors haven't started
That's the bit that should excite you.
Right now, in early 2026, the majority of local businesses across North Hertfordshire are still thinking about digital marketing entirely in terms of Google rankings. Which still matter. But AI search is a completely separate channel with completely separate rules, and almost nobody is playing the game yet.
The businesses that set themselves up for AI recommendations now tend to stay there. These tools develop preferences. Once AI trusts you as a source, it keeps coming back to you. That's a genuine first-mover advantage, and in places like Royston, Baldock, and Hitchin where competition is relatively low, the opportunity is massive.
If you want to know where you stand right now, and what it would take to get AI recommending your business, give us a shout. We work with local businesses across North Hertfordshire on answer engine optimisation and we can show you exactly what to focus on first.