How to rank on ChatGPT. A Wolverhampton guide.

Your next customer isn't typing "web designer Wolverhampton" into Google any more. They're opening ChatGPT and asking, "who should I hire to build a website for my Wolverhampton clinic?" If your business isn't in the answer, you don't exist to them. Here are six practical things every Wolverhampton small business should do right now to show up in AI search results. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, the lot.

Your business needs to be in that list. It's that simple, and it's that urgent. Google SEO still matters, but AI search is already where the next cohort of customers is heading. The businesses that show up early will be the default recommendations for a long time to come.

Rule 01Your website has to be legible to a machine, not just a human.

AI models can read your website, but not the way you do. They don't look at your pretty hero image or admire your serif headline. They look at the underlying code and the structured data. If that data is missing, you're invisible.

The single highest-leverage thing you can do is add schema.org markup, tiny, invisible bits of code that tell AI models exactly who you are, where you are, what you do, what it costs, and what your hours are. Every serious AI model reads it.

• LocalBusiness schema, name, address, phone, opening hours, area served.
• Service schema, what you sell, what it costs.
• FAQPage schema, the questions people ask about your business, and your answers.
• Review and AggregateRating schema, your star rating, number of reviews, in a format AI can parse instantly.

If you have no idea whether your website has this, it almost certainly doesn't. Most WordPress and Squarespace sites launched before 2023 don't. I can add it for £99.

Rule 02Claim every mention of your business that exists online.

AI models don't invent facts about your business. They pull from places that already contain facts, your website, yes, but also Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, Yell, Bing Places, Companies House, LinkedIn, Apple Maps, local press, Wikipedia, directories nobody's thought about in years.

Your job is to make every one of those mentions accurate, consistent, and optimised. If your Google listing says "Queen Square, Wolverhampton" and your Yell listing says "Wolverhampton city centre" and your Trustpilot bio says "based in the Midlands", you've just confused three different AI crawlers.

Pick one version of every fact about your business, name, address, phone, opening hours, postcode, services, and make it identical everywhere it appears.

Rule 03Answer the question. Directly.

AI models are trained to give concise, direct answers. When they need information, they prefer websites that give concise, direct answers. Rambling paragraphs, SEO-stuffed intros, three hundred words before you get to the point, all of it gets skipped.

Structure your content as questions followed by answers. Not metaphorically, literally. Use question-shaped H2s. Follow each one with a one-sentence direct answer, then the explanation.

• "How much does a website cost in Wolverhampton?" → Answer in the next sentence. Not a paragraph later.
• "How long does it take to build a small business site?" → Seven days. Then explain.
• "Do you fix broken WordPress sites?" → Yes, from £99. Then explain.

This is the same principle that wins featured snippets on Google, but it matters twice as much for AI, because AI is literally extracting your answer and reading it out loud to someone.

Rule 04Reviews aren't social proof any more. They're training data.

Five years ago, reviews helped humans decide whether to trust you. That was the whole point. Today, reviews do the same job for humans, but they're also the single biggest signal AI uses when recommending a local business. If someone asks ChatGPT "best plumber near Wolverhampton", the model is weighting review volume, review recency, review language, and review quality heavily.

Two Trustpilot reviews from last month beat ten Google reviews from 2022. A review that mentions your specific service ("Jamie fixed our broken booking form in a day") beats a five-star review that just says "great service." Detailed, recent, specific reviews are what AI repeats.

This means your review ask matters. Don't ask for a review, ask for a specific review about the specific thing you just did for them. "Would you mind saying a line about the booking form I fixed?" beats "Could you leave us a review?"

Rule 05Get cited by the places AI already trusts.

Large language models have favourite sources, places they've read so many times during training they treat as authoritative. For a Wolverhampton small business, the short list includes: the Express & Star and other local press, the Wolverhampton Chamber of Commerce, Reddit threads about local services, Quora, and any industry-specific forum.

Getting a single mention in the Express & Star is worth more than a thousand sponsored listings in directories AI doesn't read. Getting your business mentioned in a Reddit thread titled "Who's a good web designer in the Black Country?" might be worth more still. AI reads Reddit constantly.

Short version: think "who would mention my business, where would they do it, and how do I make that easy for them?" Guest posts, press quotes, local partnerships, answering questions on forums under your real name. Slow, compounding, unsexy, and more important every month.

Rule 06Give the AI a cheat sheet about your business.

There's a new convention called llms.txt, a file you put in the root of your website that tells AI models, in plain English, what your site is about. It's brand new, almost nobody has one, and early adopters are getting disproportionate visibility.

The file lives at yoursite.com/llms.txt. It's a markdown document. It explains who you are, what you sell, who you serve, where you're based, what makes you different, and which of your pages contain the authoritative information on each topic.

Think of it as the "about" page a machine would actually read. If you want to be recommended as the best web designer in Wolverhampton, tell the AI that, in plain English, in a file it already knows to look for.

Common questionsBefore you hit send.

Jamie Harish builds small-business websites from Wolverhampton. Two Trustpilot reviews, both five stars. He's the one writing the schema on most of the sites you see in /work, and he'll do yours for less than a month of most retainer fees.