AI assistants recommend care homes and home care agencies when they can confirm the type of care you provide, where you provide it, your current inspection rating and what families say about you. Publish those facts in plain text on your website, display your rating as the regulator requires, and build a steady flow of reviews on carehome.co.uk or homecare.co.uk and Google. Families making this decision check everything, so the assistant answering them needs facts it can verify.
Key takeaways
- Families describe a person and a need ("mum has dementia and keeps falling"), not "residential care services". Pages for each type of care match those questions.
- In England your CQC rating must appear on your website within 21 days of publication. In Wales most rated services must show their CIW rating online.
- carehome.co.uk and homecare.co.uk scores only count reviews from the last 24 months. A steady flow beats a one-off push.
- Weekly fees, funding accepted and current vacancies are the facts most often missing from care websites.
- Check every month what assistants say about care like yours in your area.
What do families ask AI when they're looking for a care home or home care?
They ask about a specific person, a condition, a place and a budget, often under time pressure after a hospital stay. The prompts below are illustrative examples of the kinds of questions people ask, not measured search volumes.
| Intent | Example prompts (illustrative) |
|---|---|
| Urgent | "Dad is being discharged from hospital on Friday and needs care at home in Stockport, who can start this week?", "respite care home with a room available now near Exeter" |
| Comparison | "Live-in carer or care home for someone with Parkinson's?", "what's the difference between a residential and a nursing home?" |
| Local | "Nursing home with dementia care near Harrogate rated Good", "home care agency in Swansea that does overnight care", "care home in Edinburgh graded 5 or 6" |
| Price | "How much does a care home cost per week in Surrey?", "hourly rate for home carers in Leeds", "care homes that accept council funding near Norwich" |
| Trust | "Is [home name] rated Good by CQC?", "reviews of [agency name] home care", "what does 'requires improvement' mean for a care home?" |
Where does AI get its answers about care homes and home care?
From the public sources a careful family would check: the regulator, specialist review sites, your website and your Google listing. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode use pages that are indexed and eligible to show a snippet, with no extra technical requirements (Google Search Central, 2025).
| Source | What it is | Why it matters for care providers |
|---|---|---|
| CQC (England) | The regulator's site, with a "Find care services" search | CQC inspects and rates services. Services with an overall rating must show it on their websites (CQC, n.d.). |
| Care Inspectorate (Scotland) | Regulator and inspector of care services | Publishes inspection reports and grades for every service (mygov.scot, n.d.), on a scale from 6 Excellent to 1 Unsatisfactory (The Access Group, n.d.). |
| Care Inspectorate Wales | Regulator for Wales | Rates care homes and domiciliary support services on four themes, from "excellent" to "requires significant improvement", since 1 April 2025 (Welsh Government, 2025). |
| carehome.co.uk | Care home directory and review site | Scores homes out of 10 from reviews in the last 24 months (carehome.co.uk, n.d.). |
| homecare.co.uk | Home care directory and review site | Same 24-month model, with six ratings per review including dignity and value for money (homecare.co.uk, n.d.). |
| Google Business Profile | Listing on Search and Maps | Google says complete information and more reviews help local ranking (Google Business Profile Help, n.d.). |
| Your website | Care types, fees, vacancies, team, rating | The only place you control every fact. |
| US equivalent | Medicare Care Compare | CMS rates nursing homes from 1 to 5 stars on health inspections, staffing and quality measures, published on Care Compare (CMS, n.d.). |
The 7-step plan to get your care service recommended
Give each type of care its own page. Residential, nursing, dementia, respite, end-of-life, live-in, hourly visits, overnight care. On each page, say who it suits, what's included, which conditions you can and can't support, and the areas or towns you cover. A family asking about "dementia care with nursing near Harrogate" needs to see all three facts on one page.
Display your rating correctly, and in text. In England, Regulation 20A requires your latest overall CQC rating on every website where you describe the service, no later than 21 calendar days after CQC publishes it, even if you've requested a review (CQC, n.d.). CQC offers a widget. Also write the rating and date in a sentence ("Rated Good by CQC, report published [month year]") so assistants can read it alongside your other facts. In Wales, most services must display ratings at their premises and online after inspection (Welsh Government, 2025). In Scotland, state your latest Care Inspectorate grades and link to the report.
Publish fees, funding and vacancies. A weekly fee range for each care type, or an hourly rate for home care, with what is included and what costs extra. Say whether you accept local authority funding, NHS Continuing Healthcare and self-funders. Keep a dated "current availability" line. Price and availability prompts can only include you if these facts exist somewhere public.
Keep your regulator and directory details matching. Your registered name, address, manager and service types should read the same on the regulator's site, carehome.co.uk or homecare.co.uk, Google and your website. Mismatched names make it harder for an assistant to be sure all the evidence is about you.
Build a steady flow of reviews. Both carehome.co.uk and homecare.co.uk score out of 10, combining the average rating with progress towards 20 positive reviews in a rolling 24 months. Reviews stop counting after 24 months, and providers with none in that period get no score (carehome.co.uk, n.d.; homecare.co.uk, n.d.). Ask every resident's family, or every home care client, at the same points, such as six weeks after moving in and at each care review.
Ask fairly and never pay for reviews. Google prohibits incentives for reviews (Google Business Profile Help, n.d.) and selectively soliciting positive ones (Google, n.d.). Since 6 April 2025, UK law bans fake reviews, reviews that conceal an incentive and misleading presentation such as suppressing negative reviews (CMS, 2025). Reply to reviews without disclosing anything about a resident's health or care.
Answer the hard questions in writing. Visiting arrangements, how you handle falls, staffing at night, end-of-life care, what happens when funds run low, what's in a typical day. These are the questions families ask assistants. Add LocalBusiness structured data with your name, address, phone and website; schema.org's MedicalBusiness list has no care home type (Schema.org, n.d.), and Google says no special markup is needed for AI features.
Also check that robots.txt and any firewall allow OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search (OpenAI, n.d.), PerplexityBot (Perplexity, n.d.) and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic, n.d.).
Mistakes that keep care providers out of AI answers
- A rating only in an image or widget. It meets the rule but gives assistants less to read. Add a text line too.
- An out-of-date rating. Showing an old "Good" after a new report is published breaks CQC rules and gives assistants conflicting facts. CQC may act against false or misleading ratings information.
- "Please call for prices". Fee questions then go to providers and articles that publish numbers.
- One page for every kind of care. "We offer a range of care services" matches nothing specific.
- Reviews from one burst three years ago. They no longer count towards the 24-month score.
- Group branding that hides the home. If the group name is everywhere and the home name is buried, assistants struggle to connect the home to its own rating and reviews.
- Asking only the happiest families. Google prohibits it, and UK law bans suppressing negative reviews.
How do you check whether AI recommends your care service?
Ask the assistants what families ask, and record the answers each month.
- Choose 10 prompts from the table, using your town, your care types and your rating.
- Run each in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode), Gemini, Claude and Copilot, in a logged-out or private window where possible.
- Note whether you're named, whether your rating and fees are stated correctly, which providers appear instead and which sources are cited.
- Fix wrong facts at the source: your website first, then the directory listings and Google.
- In Google Search Console, AI feature traffic is included in the Performance report under the "Web" search type (Google Search Central, 2025).
SearchCrow runs these checks for you. It asks the main AI assistants the questions families ask about care homes and home care near you, shows whether your service is named and which sources they rely on, and suggests what to fix first. It's priced for single homes and small agencies.
FAQ
Why doesn't ChatGPT recommend our care home? Usually because the facts families ask about are hard to find or out of date. People ask for "nursing home with dementia care near Harrogate" or "live-in carer in Cornwall rated Good". If your website doesn't state the type of care, your current inspection rating, weekly fees and vacancies in plain text, and your review profile is thin, a home or agency that publishes those facts is easier to recommend.
Do we have to show our CQC rating on our website? Yes, if your service in England has an overall CQC rating. Regulation 20A requires the latest rating on every website where you describe the service, no later than 21 calendar days after CQC publishes it, even if you've asked for a review. CQC offers a website widget, or you can use your own materials, as long as the rating is clear and conspicuous.
What about care services in Scotland and Wales? Scotland's Care Inspectorate grades services from 6 (excellent) to 1 (unsatisfactory) and publishes inspection reports. Care Inspectorate Wales has rated care homes and domiciliary support services since 1 April 2025 on a four-point scale, and most rated services must display their ratings at their premises and online. State your regulator and latest result on your site.
How does the carehome.co.uk review score work? It is a score out of 10 built from reviews published in the last 24 months. Half comes from the average of each review's ratings and half from the number of positive reviews, against a target of 20 within a rolling 24 months plus a share of registered beds. Reviews stop counting after 24 months, so a home needs a steady flow, not a one-off push.
What structured data should a care home use? Schema.org has no dedicated care home type, so use LocalBusiness with your name, address, phone, website and opening or visiting hours, and make sure every value matches the visible page. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special structured data, so markup tidies up facts you already publish; it won't get you recommended on its own.
Sources
- How providers must display ratings, Care Quality Commission
- Who we are, Care Quality Commission
- How care is regulated, mygov.scot
- Care Inspectorate grades: everything you need to know, The Access Group
- New ratings system for care services launches in Wales, Welsh Government
- Ratings for care home and domiciliary support services, Care Inspectorate Wales
- Public ratings launched in Wales, Homecare Association
- How is the review score calculated?, carehome.co.uk
- How is the review score calculated?, homecare.co.uk
- Five-Star Quality Rating System, CMS
- MedicalBusiness, Schema.org
- AI features and your website, Google Search Central
- Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, Google Business Profile Help
- Get reviews on your Business Profile, Google Business Profile Help
- Fake engagement policy, Google
- No more faux five-stars: the DMCC Act bans fake reviews, CMS
- Overview of OpenAI crawlers, OpenAI
- Perplexity crawlers, Perplexity
- Anthropic crawler FAQ, Anthropic