How to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business

It takes an afternoon, and it is the most useful hour you can spend on this subject, because it tells you whether any of the advice about AI visibility applies to you yet.

Step 1: write the questions a buyer would type

Not the questions you wish they asked. The ones they actually would, in their words, at the stage they are at. Aim for six to ten, across four kinds:

• The category and the place: “who builds custom software in Cape Town?” or “best accountant for a small manufacturing business in Leeds”.
• The problem, not the service: “my website gets visitors but no enquiries, who can help?”
• The comparison: “what should I look for in a marketing agency?” and “[your name] vs [a competitor]”.
• Your own name: “what does [your business] do?” and “is [your business] any good?”

Step 2: ask each assistant, from a clean start

Put every question to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Start a new conversation each time, so earlier questions do not colour the answer, and where you can, ask while logged out or in a private window, because some assistants personalise.

Answers vary from one asking to the next. That is normal, and it is why you ask a few different ways rather than relying on one reply.

Step 3: write down what comes back

A simple table is enough. For every question and assistant, record:

• Whether you were named at all.
• Whether what it said about you was accurate: what you do, where, for whom.
• Who else was named, and how they were described.
• Which sources it cited, if it showed any. Those are the pages the assistant relied on.

How to read the result

Most businesses land in one of three places. You are absent, which is common and fixable. You are present but described wrongly or thinly, which usually means the assistant is working from an old or vague page. Or a competitor is named again and again, which tells you exactly whose pages the assistants find easiest to use.

What to do about each

• Absent: look at what the named businesses have that you do not. It is usually plain, specific pages: what they do, where, for whom, with the common questions answered directly.
• Described wrongly: find the source it cited and fix or replace that page. Check that your own site states the facts in plain sentences, not only in images or buried in a footer.
• A competitor dominates: read their pages the way an assistant would. Notice what they state outright that you leave implied.

What this will not tell you

It is a snapshot, not a ranking. No one can promise you a place in these answers, and we cannot control which businesses an assistant names. What you can control is how easy your site is to read and trust, and whether the facts about you are consistent everywhere they appear.

Repeat the exercise monthly with the same questions. A change in who gets named, and why, is the closest thing to a ranking report this channel has.