How niche recruitment firms can get found through ChatGPT

By Ben Martland / DomiSearch · 23/10/2026

AI search gives specialist agencies another way to be discovered before a sales conversation. Start by making your specialism clear and giving employers evidence that you can handle their brief.

Your next client could be asking ChatGPT for a recruiter in your niche. If your expertise is hard to find online, you may never be considered.

Imagine a hiring manager asking ChatGPT:

“Which recruitment firms specialise in senior compliance and risk hires for financial services companies in London?”

Or

“Which specialist recruiters could help us hire a Chief of Staff for a London family office?”

You may have spent years in that market. You know which candidates will move and what makes a difficult brief fillable. But a website promising only to “connect great talent with great businesses” leaves that expertise hidden.

AI search gives specialist agencies another way to be discovered before a sales conversation. Start by making your specialism clear and giving employers evidence that you can handle their brief.

What getting found in ChatGPT actually means

When ChatGPT searches the web, it can draw on current information and link to sources in its answers. An employer can use it to explore a hiring problem, identify potential recruitment partners and ask follow-up questions about them.

Your firm might be named as an option, or one of your pages cited as a source. A citation is not necessarily a recommendation, and neither guarantees an enquiry.

Improving this visibility is often called answer engine optimisation, or AEO. It starts with understanding employers’ questions, demonstrating your expertise and making that information accessible online.

Start with the questions your clients ask

Write down five questions a prospective client might ask before choosing a recruiter. Use recent sales calls and hiring briefs to make them specific. For example:

Which agencies recruit maintenance engineers for food manufacturers in the Midlands?

We’re a UK SaaS business hiring our first Finance Director. Who can help?

How should we choose which recruiter to give exclusivity to on a hard-to-fill compliance role?

Try your questions in fresh ChatGPT conversations with web search enabled. Keep your agency name out of the question: you are checking whether someone who has never heard of you could discover you. For a cleaner comparison, use Temporary Chat with personalisation turned off, and keep the wording and target location consistent.

Record the question, date, firms named and pages cited. Check the sources and repeat periodically: answers vary, so treat the results as a sample of visibility.

Give your specialism a page of its own

Choose one specialism you want to grow. Read its website page as an employer who knows nothing about your firm.

Is it clear which roles you fill, for which organisations, at what seniority and in which locations? Can a visitor see relevant experience? Ask someone outside the business to check; what seems obvious to you may be unclear to them.

Explain the hiring problems you solve and how your search process works. Link to relevant case studies and articles, and give employers a clear way to discuss a hire alongside the candidate journey.

Turn your recruitment knowledge into useful answers

Think of a question you answered on a client call this week. What did you explain that someone outside your market would struggle to know? Build an article around that.

An engineering recruiter could explain how competition from better-funded sectors affects maintenance hiring. A finance recruiter could explain when a growing business needs a fractional CFO or a financial controller.

Put the answer near the top, then explain what changes it. Include an example and a practical next step. If you give salary figures or hiring timelines, state the market, period and supporting evidence.

Try recording a five-minute voice note answering one client question. Turn it into a focused article, check each claim and link to the relevant service page. AI can organise a draft; your experience supplies its value.

You can also send the article after a sales call, giving it value beyond AI visibility.

Show the evidence behind your expertise

Write a short case study covering one successful assignment: the role and sector, the challenge, your approach and the verified outcome.

Explain your decisions. Did you change an unrealistic specification, find a different candidate pool or resolve a problem with an offer? Show how your judgement helped.

Use names and testimonials with permission. For confidential assignments, anonymise the details while explaining what you did and why. The process helps demonstrate expertise alongside the result.

Keep your website, LinkedIn company page and Recruitment Supplier profile consistent about your specialisms and markets. Relevant industry contributions and genuine reviews give buyers more places to check your experience, although they cannot guarantee an AI recommendation.

Make sure search systems can access the work

Ask your website manager to check that key service pages are accessible to search crawlers, linked from other pages and present their key information as text.

OpenAI's guidance says OAI-SearchBot needs access for page content to be included in ChatGPT summaries and snippets. Your developer can check both the site's crawler rules and any hosting or security settings that might block it.

Google also says its established SEO practices remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no special AI markup required. A clear, accessible website with useful content is a sensible foundation. No technical change can guarantee that an AI service will recommend your firm.

Measure progress through to the enquiry

Track the same buyer questions and any AI referral visits your analytics can identify. Ask new prospects how they found you and record their answers.

Measure mentions, website visits, qualified enquiries and placements separately to see whether visibility is reaching the right employers.

In month one, check five buyer questions, improve one service page, publish one useful answer and add one credible case study. Use what you learn to choose the next priorities.

How DomiSearch helps recruitment firms

DomiSearch brings together recruitment and digital marketing experience. We help specialist firms build an online presence that reflects the expertise behind their networks, referrals and client relationships.

A prospective client may hear your name from someone they trust, then check Google or ChatGPT. Clear, relevant information helps them assess whether to start a conversation.

We identify the buyer questions that matter, assess current visibility and build a plan covering technical improvements, content and evidence of expertise, with ongoing measurement.

Our managed service handles the agreed implementation and content programme. For smaller firms able to write and publish themselves, our one-off 90-day roadmap includes detailed content briefs and a writing framework they can keep using.

In our monitoring, one UK firm we worked with went from zero to 600+ tracked mentions a month across AI search platforms. A mention records the firm appearing in an answer to a question we track. These totals depend on the questions, platforms and frequency of checks; they measure visibility in that sample, not unique buyers, website visits or enquiries.

If you would like to discuss where your agency stands, email hi@domisearch.com with your website, recruitment specialism and target market to arrange an initial conversation.