Free tool
How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business
Open ChatGPT, ask it what your customer would ask, something like "best [your category] in [your city]", and look for two things in the reply: whether your name is in the list and whether your own website is among the sources. Then ask the same thing in three or four other wordings, because a single answer proves very little.
Most owners we talk to have never done this. They have googled themselves plenty, but asking ChatGPT directly feels strange, and there is no obvious box for it. By hand the check takes about ten minutes, in the same five steps we run before we touch anything for a client.
First, open a fresh chat or log out, so nothing you typed earlier colors the answer and you see what a stranger sees.
Second, ask the way a customer asks. Start with "best [your category] in [your city]", then try "who do you recommend for [your main service] in [your city]". Write down every business name in each reply.
Third, look past the names and read the sources. When ChatGPT searches the web it shows links under the text, and that is where you want your own site. A business can be named while every link points somewhere else: in our Miami test ChatGPT named a med spa in 13 of 46 answers and cited its website exactly once.
Fourth, change the wording and ask again. Add a neighborhood or swap "best" for "top rated", then come back in a week and run the same questions again, because the names move around more than people expect.
Fifth, write down who got cited instead of you. In our tests the links usually go to a directory or a review site rather than to any competitor's homepage, and those are the pages ChatGPT trusts for your question.
Here is what a miss looks like. We ran this on ten independent med spas in Los Angeles, picked straight from a Google search, and asked both ChatGPT and Perplexity to name a med spa in the city. Neither engine cited a single one of the ten.
That surprises owners because they expect AI search to work like Google, with a page three nobody scrolls to. ChatGPT works differently. It keeps a small set of pages it trusts for a given question, and if your site is outside that set you are simply absent, with no low ranking to climb from.
Let me be honest about what one check proves. The same business gets named in one wording and skipped in the next, and the engines change their minds over weeks. So I would treat a single clean answer as a good sign rather than proof, and a single miss as a reason to ask again rather than a verdict.
Once you know which pages got cited instead of you, the work is clear: get listed there with your name, address and phone matching exactly everywhere. In our testing that did more for a business than another technical fix on its own site or a redesigned homepage.
If you would rather skip the typing, our Quick Check will run five of these questions against ChatGPT and Perplexity in about thirty seconds, and you do not need to leave an email to see the result.