How-To
How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business, free, in 10 minutes
Someone in your town needs what you sell. Two years ago they typed it into Google and scrolled. Today a growing share of them ask ChatGPT, and ChatGPT names three businesses. If you are not one of the three, that customer never learns you exist. There is no page two to climb to.
You can find out where you stand this afternoon. It costs nothing and takes about ten minutes.
The Short Version
Open a logged-out ChatGPT window, ask the five questions a customer would ask before they know your name, and write down which businesses it recommends and which websites it cites. Repeat in Perplexity and in Google's AI Overview. Log it in a spreadsheet with today's date, then do it again in a month. That log is your baseline, and it is the only thing that will tell you whether anything you change later actually works.
Step 1: Write the five questions a customer would ask
This is the step people get wrong, and getting it wrong makes the whole exercise useless.
Do not ask "What do you know about Smith Plumbing?" The model will find you, you will feel reassured, and you will have learned nothing. A customer who already knows your name is not the customer you are worried about.
Ask what a stranger asks. A stranger describes a problem and a place:
- "Who is the best plumber in Towson, Maryland?"
- "I need an emergency plumber near Towson tonight, who should I call?"
- "What should I look for when hiring a plumber to replace a water heater?"
- "Best rated plumbing companies in Baltimore County"
- "Is [competitor name] a good plumber?"
Write five like these for your own business. Mix them up: one broad category question, one urgent question, one advice question where a good answer would cite an expert, one "best of" list question, and one about a competitor. Different question shapes pull different answers, and you want to know where you stand across all of them.
The competitor question matters more than it looks. If ChatGPT has a confident, detailed answer about your competitor and a vague one about you, that gap is your problem statement.
Step 2: Ask them in a logged-out window
Open a private or incognito browser window and go to ChatGPT. Do not log in, or if you must, use an account with no history related to your business.
This matters. If you have spent six months chatting with ChatGPT about your own company, it may have memory or personalization that colors the answer. You will see a flattering result that no stranger will ever see. The whole point is to see what a stranger sees.
Ask each of your five questions exactly as you wrote them. For each answer, write down two things:
- Which businesses did it name? Were you among them? In what position, and with what description?
- Did it hedge? Answers like "I do not have current information on local plumbers, but here is how to find one" tell you the model has no useful data about your category in your area. That is a gap, and gaps can be filled.
Step 3: Follow the citations
When ChatGPT searches the web to answer, it shows source links. Click them. This is the most valuable ten seconds of the whole exercise.
You will usually find that the answer came from somewhere predictable: a Yelp category page, a "best plumbers in Baltimore" listicle on a site you have never heard of, a Reddit thread from 2023, a local news roundup. Those sources are the machinery behind the recommendation.
Which means those sources are your lever. You cannot edit ChatGPT. You can get listed on the directory it trusts, get mentioned in the listicle it keeps citing, or answer the question in a Reddit thread where your category comes up. Practitioners call this answer engine optimization, and stripped of the jargon it comes down to influencing the sources the model reads.
Write down every source you see. After five questions you will have a short list of the sites that decide your category's AI reputation.
Step 4: Do it again in Perplexity and Google
ChatGPT is not the only answer engine, and the three big ones disagree constantly.
Run the same five questions in Perplexity, which shows its citations more prominently than ChatGPT does. Then type the same questions into Google and look at the AI Overview that appears above the blue links, which draws on a different index again.
Expect inconsistency. You may appear in Perplexity and be invisible in ChatGPT, or the reverse. That is normal and it is useful information. It usually means one system trusts a source that mentions you and the other does not.
Step 5: Log it, then do it again next month
Open a spreadsheet. One row per question per engine. Columns:
| Date | Engine | Question | Mentioned? | Competitors named | Sources cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-12 | ChatGPT | Best plumber in Towson MD | No | Acme, Bell, Carter | yelp.com, bmoreliving.com |
| 2026-07-12 | Perplexity | Best plumber in Towson MD | Yes, 3rd | Acme, Bell | yelp.com, reddit.com/r/baltimore |
Fifteen rows, one afternoon. Then set a calendar reminder for one month out and do it again.
A single check is a snapshot and it tells you almost nothing. AI answers vary between runs even with identical questions, so one bad result might be noise and one good result might be luck. The value is in the trend. Three months of logs will tell you whether you are gaining ground, and more importantly, whether the changes you made had any effect at all.
What this free method cannot tell you
Being straight about the limits, since the limits are the entire argument for paying for a tool later.
You are running a sample of one. Ask ChatGPT the same question five times and you can get five different answers. Your single Tuesday afternoon result may not represent what most people see. Serious measurement means running each prompt many times and reporting a mention rate, which is tedious by hand and trivial for software.
You are checking a handful of questions. Real customers ask hundreds of variations. You are sampling five.
You cannot see yourself the way a stranger in another city sees you. AI answers vary by location and by user context, and your incognito window is still your IP address.
You have no history. If you want to know whether you were mentioned more often in March than in June, and you did not check in March, that answer is gone.
You will not keep doing it. This is the honest one. Manual checking is boring, and month three is when most owners quit.
Paid AI visibility tools exist to solve exactly these five problems: they run each prompt repeatedly, track dozens or hundreds of prompts, check from multiple locations, keep a history, and do it without you remembering to. Whether that is worth $24 or $250 a month depends on how much your category's AI answers are worth to you, and on whether the tool actually delivers. We are testing that claim on a real small business website and publishing everything we find.
Do this first, whatever you do next
Run the ten-minute check before you buy anything. You will learn whether you have a problem worth spending money on, and you will have a hand-built baseline that no tool can give you retroactively. If you subscribe to a visibility tool tomorrow, its history starts tomorrow. Your spreadsheet can start today.
And if the check shows ChatGPT confidently recommending three competitors and never mentioning you, do not panic. That is the normal starting position for almost every small business. It is also the reason this category of tool exists.