As of 13 August 2026, AI can find local business prospects in the UK.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Write down your offer, target sectors, locations, preferred business size and the business problem you solve.
   2. Open your CRM or customer list and gather existing customers, prospects and exclusions so the model does not return accounts you already know.
   3. Paste the prompt into a chatbot and replace each bracketed field with your offer, territory, ideal customer profile, buying signals and exclusions.
   4. Ask the chatbot to use publicly available UK business sources and to return source URLs, verified facts and unknowns rather than filling gaps.
   5. Copy the shortlist into a spreadsheet and open each business website and source URL to check that the business operates in the target area, still matches your criteria and shows the stated signal.
   6. Remove duplicates and unsuitable businesses, check the contact route and CRM status, then send only the compliant, relevant prospects to your approved outreach workflow.

   Prompt

   Find local business prospects in the UK for this offer: [describe the product or service].
   
   Target area: [towns, counties, regions or postcode areas]
   Target sectors: [sectors]
   Preferred business size: [size or turnover range, if known]
   Ideal customer profile: [problems, technology, customer type or other fit criteria]
   Useful buying signals: [recent hiring, expansion, funding, new premises, outdated website, relevant tender or other signals]
   Exclude: [business types, locations or existing customers to exclude]
   
   Create a shortlist of up to [number] businesses. Use current, publicly available sources where available. For each prospect, give the business name, location, website, sector, evidence that it matches the profile, any evidence of the buying signal, a suggested reason to contact it, and the source URL for every factual claim. Separate verified facts from your inference. Do not invent businesses, people, job titles, contact details, buying signals or dates. Do not include personal email addresses or mobile numbers unless I provide them or they are clearly published as a business contact route. Mark missing information as unknown.
   
   Rank the prospects by fit and strength of evidence, not by confidence of wording. Add a final column called "checks before outreach" listing what I must confirm manually, including whether the business is still trading, whether the contact route is current, whether it is already in my CRM, and whether my proposed outreach needs a UK GDPR or PECR review. Use British English and return the result as a compact table followed by the five highest-priority checks.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.