How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business

To check whether ChatGPT recommends your business, open a fresh, logged-out chat and run three prompts - a recommendation prompt, a brand prompt, and a comparison prompt - three times each, and record whether you are named and which websites the answer cites. Here is the exact protocol.

The three prompts to run

Open a new chat in ChatGPT - and ideally Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews too. Use a fresh, logged-out session so your own history doesn't skew the answer. Then run these three prompts, swapping in your service, city, and business name:

1. Recommendation prompt: "Who are the best [service] in [city]?" This is the one that matters most - it shows whether you are in the set of businesses the model names on its own.
2. Brand prompt: "Is [your business name] any good?" This shows what the model already knows, or wrongly believes, about you.
3. Comparison prompt: "[Your business] vs [a competitor] - which is better for [need]?" This shows how you are positioned against a named rival.

Run each one three times

AI answers vary between runs, so a single try tells you little. Run each prompt three times in fresh chats and write down two things every time: were you named, and which websites did the answer cite or link. That citation list is the important part - it tells you exactly which pages the model trusts for your market, which is your roadmap for getting mentioned.

What the results mean

If you are never named in the recommendation prompt, the model doesn't yet "know" you belong in that set - usually because you aren't mentioned on the third-party pages it pulls from (directories, roundups, Reddit) and your own site isn't clearly readable to it. If you are named but described wrong, the model has stale or thin information about you. Either way, the fix starts with your own site: it has to plainly state who you are, what you do, and where - in text a machine can read.

The most common reason AI can't find you

Most local sites fail one basic test: their key information only appears after JavaScript runs, or it is locked inside images and widgets. AI crawlers read the raw HTML - they don't click, scroll, or run scripts. If your services, location, and answers aren't in plain text, the model has nothing to quote. A free AI-visibility check tells you in under a minute whether your site is even readable and citable by AI search engines, and what to fix first.