How do I check if AI recommends my business?

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude the questions a customer would ask about your kind of business in your town, three times each, and write down every business each answer names. Count how many answers named you, out of how many you collected.

What you need

A private browser window, a notebook or a spreadsheet, and time to ask each question nine times, three in each assistant.

Write your questions down first

Use the words a customer uses. Most people type “near me” and a job, so put your town in the question or add a line such as “I’m in Phoenix, AZ.” Write the list before you ask anything, and keep it the same after you see the answers.

Start with three kinds of question.

The general one: “Who’s the best dentist near me? I’m in Houston, TX.”
A specific job: “Who installs a new air conditioner near me? I’m in Dallas, TX.”
An urgent need: “My roof is leaking. Who do I call near me? I’m in Phoenix, AZ.”

Ask each assistant three times

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, each in a private window, and sign out if you can. Turn web search on if the app offers it, as we do. Ask each question as one message in a new chat, and do that three times, so no answer is shaped by an earlier one. Each question then has nine answers.

Write down what each answer says

For every answer, record the date, the assistant, the question and each business named, in the order named. Mark whether the answer suggests yours as one to contact. Keep a caution about your business, a passing mention and a link to your website on their own lines. Only a suggestion to contact you counts as named.

Count the answers that named you

Say how many answers named you out of how many you collected. A count reads like “named in 2 of 9 answers to one question”, as an example. Answers that name no local business, or ask where you are, still count in the total. If an answer did not arrive, show it beside the total and leave it out of the misses.

Then list the businesses named most often. Those are the ones the assistant pointed to for your questions.

What this check covers

It shows what you got on the days you asked, three times per question.
A private window and your town in the question get you close to what a customer sees.
Google Maps and Google’s AI Mode are separate places customers look, so check them on their own.
You are counting mentions, so keep your own count of the calls that come in.

Check that assistants can read your site

Two checks cost nothing. First, ask whoever built or hosts your website whether its robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot, the crawler OpenAI says it uses to surface websites in ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that opt out are left out of ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain links.

Second, for Google’s AI features, Google’s guidance says a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements. Google adds that indexing and serving are not guaranteed.

Both checks tell you whether your site is open to the assistants that read it.

What a report adds

A report is this check done for you, at full size. That is 180 answers to 20 of your customers’ questions. You see how many named you, who was named instead and what to fix first to win more of the leads AI sends. Every answer is kept word for word.

One report is $97, and it includes a free re-check 30 days later, so you see what changed.

Be notified when we launch