How does ChatGPT choose which businesses to name?
It searches, reads and summarises, in that order. When a question is local or needs current facts, ChatGPT runs a web search, opens a selection of the pages it finds, and writes an answer from what those pages say, citing some of them. For a question like who is a good plumber in Huddersfield, the pages it reads are usually the ones already doing well in ordinary search: directories, review sites, trade bodies, and the businesses’ own websites where those are clear enough to be useful.
So the shortlist is mostly borrowed. If a search engine cannot find you, the assistant sitting on top of one is unlikely to either. That part is well understood. What is less clear is how it weighs the pages once it has them, and OpenAI does not publish that, so anyone who tells you the exact formula is guessing.
Why does the answer change from one day to the next?
Because it is written fresh every time. Change a word in the question, ask from a phone, ask while signed in to a different account, or simply ask again a week later, and the search results feeding the answer shift, so the names shift with them. Ask the same Huddersfield question twice in a week and there is a fair chance the list moves.
That is why a promise of a fixed position in ChatGPT is meaningless, and why we report a dated log of what was asked and who came back. A rank number would be invented.
Does ChatGPT use Google Business Profile or reviews?
Partly, and through other doors. ChatGPT has no access to Google’s listing data, but it reads the sites that quote your profile details and reviews, and its own search results can include business listings and a map, though how far that reaches in the UK changes month to month. Gemini, being Google’s, leans directly on Google Maps and the Business Profile behind it. Perplexity cites whatever it reads, reviews included.
The practical reading is that the same evidence feeds all of them by different routes: a complete profile, recent reviews that mention the job and the place, and a website that says the same thing. Get those right once and you are covering every assistant at the same time.
What makes one Huddersfield business get named and another not?
Clarity, mostly. Dolphin Heating is the example we keep coming back to. Fay is a Gas Safe registered engineer with more than 25 years in the trade, one van, and a steady flow of customers who specifically want a female gas engineer. Once the website said that plainly, in the words people type, the business went to number one on Google for female gas engineer Huddersfield and was named in the AI answer for the same search. The assistant did not discover anything. It read what had finally been written down.
The businesses that get left out tend to have the opposite problem: a site that opens with welcome to our website and lists services without saying where, a profile under a slightly different trading name, and three reviews that just say great job. Nothing false in any of it, and nothing an assistant can use.
What can a local business do to be part of the answer?
Five things, in order. State who you are, what you do and where in one plain sentence near the top of your site. Give each service its own page that answers the question a customer would ask about it. Make your name, address, phone and description match on your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories. Ask customers for reviews that mention the job and the town. Then put proof where it can be read: named projects, your own photographs, a page about the people.
None of that is a trick, and all of it also improves ordinary Google visibility, so it is rarely wasted even if an assistant never says your name.
Is it worth a Huddersfield business bothering yet?
If your customers already ask an assistant for recommendations, yes, and in the trades and in professional services they increasingly do. Test it tonight: ask ChatGPT and Gemini who they would use for what you sell in Huddersfield, and see whether it is you, a competitor or a directory. If it is a competitor, you have your answer. If it is a directory, the field is still open.
