Nobody can buy or guarantee a mention in ChatGPT or AI Overviews. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no additional requirements beyond normal search, and no special files or schema are needed. ChatGPT and Perplexity use crawlers you should allow in robots.txt. After that, write specific pages, keep your details identical everywhere and measure visits and enquiries. Irish Transfer’s first enquiries from AI assistants came in August 2026.
Can a chauffeur company get recommended by ChatGPT?
Yes, it can happen, and you cannot buy it or guarantee it. Travellers now ask assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews which company to book for a transfer. The answers draw on what those services can find and read about you on the web. So the practical work is to make sure they can reach your site, and that what they find is clear, specific and the same everywhere.
Most of it is ordinary search work done carefully. A company with thin pages and a neglected Google profile is unlikely to get mentioned, and no special AI technique will change that.
What does each service say it needs?
The companies behind these services publish some of their rules, and they are simpler than the sales pitches suggest.
| Service | What it says | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” | Stay indexed and eligible for normal Google results, with a snippet |
| ChatGPT search | OAI-SearchBot “is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”. | Allow OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its results, and is not used to train AI models. | Allow PerplexityBot in your robots.txt and your firewall |
Google goes further on the things people try to sell you. It says “there’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add”, and “you don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features”. We publish an llms.txt file on our own site because it costs us nothing to keep up, but nothing Google has written suggests it will help you in AI Overviews, and nobody should charge you much for one.
Is your site blocking them?
Check this first, because it takes ten minutes and a mistake here makes everything else pointless. Open your robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt to your web address, and look for rules naming OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, or a rule blocking everything. Ask whoever runs your website whether a firewall or a hosting setting blocks automated visitors, as Google also asks you to allow crawling on any CDN or host.
Training and search are separate settings. OpenAI says GPTBot concerns model training, while OAI-SearchBot concerns search, and “each setting is independent of the others”. So you can block your content from training and still appear in ChatGPT’s search results. OpenAI says a change can take about 24 hours to take effect.
What should your pages say?
Assistants answer questions, and travellers ask them in detail: “How do I get from the airport to this hotel with four people and golf bags?” A page gives them something to quote when it contains the facts that answer that question.
- Put the answer first: start each section with a direct answer to the question in its heading, because assistants lift short passages more readily than whole pages.
- Write down your specifics: pickup points, journey times, vehicles and how many bags they hold, what is included, how bookings and payment work. Only you can give these details, and generic copy gives an assistant nothing to repeat.
- Keep important facts as text: Google asks for important content “in text form”, so a price list inside an image or a PDF is easy to miss.
- Date your facts: add the date you last checked prices and rules, and update it when you check again.
The search visibility plan covers which pages to write first, and the guide to local SEO covers how they connect with your Google profile.
Do other websites matter?
They probably matter a lot, although the companies do not publish how they weigh them. An assistant that finds your name on your own site alone has little to go on. Hotels that list you as a recommended partner, tourism boards, local business directories and genuine reviews all give it something else to read.
So keep your details the same everywhere. If your website says you serve three counties, your Google profile says two and a directory has your old phone number, an assistant may report any of them. Google also asks you to keep your Business Profile current for these features. Genuine reviews help in the same way, and the Google reviews guide explains how to ask for them within the rules.
This is also why hotel partnerships do double duty. A hotel that recommends you on its own website sends you guests, and it gives assistants an independent source that says you exist and what you do.
How do you know if it is working?
Measure visits and enquiries, and be careful with anything else. Google Analytics can show visits that arrive from chatgpt.com and similar addresses, so check your traffic sources each month and look at which pages they land on. Add a question to your enquiry form or your phone routine asking how the customer found you, because many people read an answer and then search for your name, and analytics will record that as a normal search.
You can also ask the assistants yourself. Put the questions your customers ask into ChatGPT and Perplexity every month and note who gets named, and whether what they say about you is correct. Answers vary from one asking to the next and from one person to another, so treat this as a way of spotting wrong facts. A single good answer is no evidence that you rank well.
We publish no multiplier for this at Irish Transfer, because the channel is too new to compare with last year. It is a useful sign that the channel is real for a chauffeur company, and it is too early to say how large it will become.
What should you avoid?
Be wary of anyone selling a guaranteed mention or an “AI ranking”, since none of these companies offers such a thing. Avoid paid lists of “best chauffeur companies” whose only purpose is to be read by machines, and avoid hidden text or instructions aimed at assistants. They add risk and give a real customer no reason to trust you. Fake reviews are worse still: they break Google’s rules, and a false claim repeated by an assistant is hard to take back.