Google gives you ten results and a scroll bar. An AI engine gives you three or four businesses, then stops. If you are not in that handful, you are not further down the list. You are absent.
This is a free guide for UK small businesses. It covers the seventeen checks that decide whether ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini or Copilot can see your business well enough to name it, what to fix, and the order to fix it in.
The whole checklist is on this page, in full, free. If you would rather have the formatted eight page version to keep, print or hand to whoever builds your site, we will email it to you.
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One email with the PDF. No sales sequence, no pitching.
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What is in it
- Why AI answers work differently from search results, with the data
- The twenty minute test you can run yourself today, free
- The seventeen checks, in three stages, each with why it matters and how to fix it
- What to do first, second and last, so you do not waste money
- What a checklist cannot tell you, and what to do about that
The evidenceWhat the engines actually lean on
In August 2026 we put the same question to Google AI Mode in 20 UK towns across 8 trades: “Recommend a trustworthy [trade] in [town]”. That produced 160 answers naming 734 businesses. We wrote down every source the engine used.
The share of towns where it reached for a platform rather than the business’s own site:
Whito AI Visibility Index, Q3 2026. Google AI Mode, one prompt, 20 towns, 8 sectors, collected 22 August 2026. Read the full index and method.
Alongside that: Checkatrade was cited in 50 of the 60 electrician, plumber and roofing answers. Reddit and Facebook threads fed 51 of the 160 answers. “Top 10 in [town]” listicles were cited in 23.
So you do not rank in an AI answer. You get assembled. The engine builds the answer out of whatever it can read about you, wherever it finds it, and your own website is one source among several.
The principle
Being named is a structure problem before it is a content problem. An engine has to establish that you exist and are real, read what you do and where you do it, then find enough agreement elsewhere to risk recommending you.
Most businesses fail at the first or second and then spend money on the third. That is the wrong order, and it is expensive. Structure before scale.
The checklistThe seventeen checks
These are the checks our free tool runs on any UK website. Work down the list in order. A check further down is worth very little while one further up is failing.
The site loads on https, with a padlock in the address bar.
Fix: almost every host includes SSL free. Turn it on, then force http to redirect to https.
Your registered company name and number appear on the site and match the public register. When we checked 182 businesses the engines had recommended, only 49 percent could be matched to an active registered company.
Fix: company name and number in the footer of every page. If you are a sole trader, say so plainly and give a trading address. Being a sole trader is not the problem. Being unidentifiable is.
A real, working phone number written as text, not sitting inside an image. Text in an image cannot be read by anything.
Fix: header and footer, as text, in a tel: link.
A full address including the postcode, in text. Local recommendation is decided by geography, and without a postcode an engine has to guess which town you serve.
Fix: full address in the footer. If you work from home, give the town and list the areas you cover.
The browser tab title says what you do and where. It is the strongest short description a machine has of the page, and the one most often left as a theme default.
Fix: trade, town, business name. “Electrician in Chester | Name Ltd” beats “Home | Name Ltd”.
The page carries JSON-LD, the standard format machines read business facts from. Without it, everything about you has to be inferred from prose.
Fix: most SEO plugins output it. Switch it on, then confirm it is in the page source.
That structured data identifies you as an Organization or LocalBusiness, with name, address and phone. Generic schema tells an engine there is a web page. Business schema tells it there is a business.
Fix: complete the business details section in your SEO plugin, then re-test.
Your structured data links out to the other profiles you control: Google Business Profile, Companies House, Checkatrade, LinkedIn, Facebook. This is how an engine joins scattered mentions of you into one business, and it is the one almost nobody does.
Fix: list every profile you own in the sameAs field. Only ones you control.
Your robots.txt does not block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or CCBot. This is the most common and most fixable failure there is. A business can spend a year on content while its own robots.txt tells the engines to stay out.
Fix: open yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt and read it. If those names appear next to Disallow, decide deliberately whether you meant that. Plenty of people never chose it. A plugin default chose it for them.
A plain text file at the root of your site describing your business for AI engines. It is new and not universally read yet, so treat it as cheap insurance rather than a fix.
Fix: a short file naming who you are, what you do, where, and your key pages. Ten minutes.
An XML sitemap exists and is reachable, so a crawler is told what to look at rather than finding pages by luck.
Fix: your SEO plugin generates one. Submit it in Google Search Console.
Every page that matters has one, written by you. Leave it blank and something else writes it, usually by scraping the first paragraph. We have found live pages describing the wrong industry entirely.
Fix: 140 to 155 characters saying plainly what the page is for.
One clear H1 per page. It is the heading a machine trusts most, and a page with none, or five, gives it nothing to hold on to.
Fix: one H1, in the words a customer would actually use.
Real questions and answers on the page, marked up so machines can lift them. AI answers are built out of question and answer pairs, so supplying them in the right shape is the most direct route to being quoted.
Fix: three to six questions you are genuinely asked, answered honestly. Do not invent them, and do not answer them with a sales pitch.
Real substance on the site, not four sentences and a phone number. Thin sites get skipped in favour of a directory that has more to say about you than you do.
Fix: one honest page per service, saying what it covers and roughly what it costs.
Open Graph tags, so a link to you renders with a title, description and image. Sharing is one of the places engines pick businesses up.
Fix: your SEO plugin handles this. Set a default image and check one link in a messaging app.
Something has changed recently and the dates are visible. A site that has not moved in three years reads as a business that may not exist any more. Given what check 2 found, that is not paranoia.
Fix: date your pages. Update prices when they change. That is enough.
The orderWhat to do first
Fix these in the wrong order and you will waste money. Here is the order.
Padlock, phone, address, page title, robots.txt. None of these need a developer and none cost anything. Check 9 on its own has undone a year of effort for businesses we have looked at.
Company details published, schema switched on and completed, profiles linked, sitemap submitted, titles and descriptions written by a human. A competent web person does the lot in a day.
Content, questions, freshness. This is the part that never finishes, which is exactly why it goes last rather than first.
Getting named in the places engines already read. This is the step almost everyone starts with. It works, but only once the three above are done, because a mention pointing at a site an engine cannot read is a mention wasted.
What a checklist cannot tell you
Everything above is about whether an engine can see you. None of it tells you whether an engine does name you, or who it names instead.
That has to be measured, not inferred. It means putting real customer questions to real engines, in your towns, and writing down the answers. It is the difference between checking your shop has a door and standing outside counting who walks in. The guide shows you how to do a rough version yourself in twenty minutes, and for a lot of businesses that is enough.
Where to go next
The seventeen checks above, run on your site in under a minute, scored out of 100 with a fix for each one. The full result appears on the page and we do not ask for your email address.
A verified listing, checked against Companies House by a person. Free permanently, and it is one of the corroborating sources described in check 8.
The AI Visibility Index for Q3 2026: eight sectors, twenty towns, every figure on this page, and the method published so you can repeat it.
We run the study for one UK sector: every business the engines named, every source they leaned on, town by town. Built to order after you buy, delivered within one working day.
The Whito Audit. Done by a human, not a tool, with a plain English fix list you can hand to whoever builds your site.
Questions
Is the guide really free?
Yes. The whole checklist is on this page with no email required. The email only gets you the formatted PDF and puts you on the Whito Insights list, which you can leave in one click.
Do I need a developer to do any of this?
Not for the first five checks. Padlock, phone number, address, page title and robots.txt are all things a business owner can check and usually fix themselves. Most of the rest are settings in an SEO plugin. Only the content work in stage three takes real time.
Where do the figures come from?
Two pieces of our own research, both published in full with their methods. The AI Visibility Index Q3 2026: Google AI Mode, one prompt, 20 UK towns, 8 sectors, 160 answers, 734 businesses, collected 22 August 2026. And the electricians study: ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode across 15 UK towns, 182 businesses, July 2026, each one checked against Companies House.
Will doing all seventeen get me recommended?
No, and anyone who promises that is selling something. The checks decide whether an engine can see and read you. Whether it names you also depends on reviews, on where else you are mentioned, and on what your competitors are doing. What the checks do is stop you being ruled out before the question is even asked.
How often will you email me?
There is no fixed schedule. We send when we have checked something worth passing on. Some weeks that is two or three emails, some weeks none. One click removes you.
This guide is general information for UK small businesses, not advice on your specific situation. Prices correct at August 2026.