How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business

More people now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of typing a search. “Who is a good electrician in Lancaster?” gets a short answer with three or four names in it. If yours is not one of them, you never find out. Nobody tells you that you were left out.

You can check this yourself in about ten minutes.

Ask the way a customer would

Open ChatGPT, and do not sign in if you can avoid it. A signed-in account remembers things about you, and you want the answer a stranger would get.

Write three questions a new customer might ask. Do not use your business name. Good ones follow this pattern:

• “Who is a good [what you do] in [your town]?”
• “I need [the problem you solve] near [your area]. Who would you recommend?”
• “What is the best [what you do] for [a kind of customer] in [your town]?”

Ask each question twice, in a new chat each time. AI answers change from one run to the next, so one try tells you very little.

Write down three things

For each answer, note:

1. Were you named? Yes or no.
2. Who was named instead? These are the businesses the assistant thinks you compete with. They are often not the ones you would guess.
3. What did it say about them? “Known for fast call-outs” or “highly rated” tells you what the assistant picked up about them.

Then run the same questions in Perplexity and in Google, where an AI answer often sits above the normal results. Each one draws on different sources, so it is normal to be named in one and missing from another.

If you were not named

An assistant can only repeat what it can read. Three things make a business easy to read:

• A website that says plainly what you do and where. One page for each service, with the town in the text. A homepage that says “Welcome to our website” gives an assistant nothing to quote.
• A complete Google Business Profile. Category, services, opening hours, photos and recent reviews.
• The same details everywhere. Name, address and phone number matching on the website, the Google profile and any directories.

None of this is a trick, and nobody can promise you a place in an AI answer. Be wary of anyone who does. What you can do is make it easy for an assistant to understand your business and see that customers rate it.

Keep it in proportion

AI answers are still a small share of how customers find a local business. Google search and Google Maps send far more. The same work helps with both, so you do not have to choose.