How to check what AI says about your business, in 15 minutes

• The free apps for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, or their websites.
• A notes app or a sheet of paper.
• 15 minutes today, and 5 more on another day.

Start a new chat for every question, so an earlier conversation doesn't steer the answer.

Write them the way a stranger would type them: your town, the kind of business, and what they need. Leave your business name out. Someone who doesn't know you yet can't ask for you by name, and a question with your name in it only tells you whether the assistant has heard of you, not whether it recommends you.

Specific questions work best. Mix a few kinds:

• The plain need: “Who is a good dentist in [your town]?”
• A need with a detail: “A café in [your town] with good wifi, open early on Sunday.”
• An urgent one: “I need a plumber in [your town] today. Who should I call?”
• A comparison: “Which hardware store near [your town] has the best choice of outdoor paint?”
• The question you hear most often at your counter or on the phone.

Ask all five questions in each of the four apps. For every answer, note three things:

• Who is named, and in what order. Is your business there?
• Which links appear: your own website, your Google Maps listing, a directory, a review site, or another business's page.
• Anything wrong about you: old hours, an old address, a service you don't offer.

The links matter because these assistants search the web before they answer. OpenAI says ChatGPT “typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries”, and Google calls its version “query fan-out”. Claude answers with direct citations to the pages it used. So the links show you which pages each assistant read about your kind of business in your town.

Those pages are not always the businesses' own. When BrightLocal traced 800 local searches in ChatGPT, business websites were 58% of the sources. In a Yext count of 6.8 million sources, almost half of ChatGPT's came from third-party sites such as Yelp and Tripadvisor, while on Gemini, 52% were the business's own website.

One answer proves very little. In a SparkToro study, volunteers ran the same prompts 2,961 times, and there was less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI would give the same list of brands in any two answers. So ask the same five questions again in a few days, and look at how often you come up, not at one answer.

If some of your customers speak another language, ask the same questions in that language too, and write those answers down separately. Then compare: are the same businesses named, with the same links?

Your Google Business Profile. Gemini takes its facts about places “from Google Maps”, and Google's own guide lists an up-to-date Business Profile among the things that help a business appear in AI answers. Open your profile at business.google.com and check:

• The category says what you really are.
• The hours are right, including holidays.
• The address and phone number are current.
• The website link goes to your own site.

Your website. Open it on your phone. Does it say, in ordinary text, what you do, the town or area you serve, when you're open and how to reach you? Google's checklist asks that “important content is available in textual form”, and a Vercel study found that none of the major AI crawlers ran JavaScript, apart from Google's. Words that only appear inside an image, a PDF or a widget may never be read.

Then ask whoever looks after your site to confirm it doesn't block the assistants' search crawlers. OpenAI says sites that opt out of its crawler, OAI-SearchBot, “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”.

The same facts everywhere. Your name, address, phone and hours should match on your site, your Google profile and every listing. OpenAI itself warns that “search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect”. Don't give the assistants two versions to choose from.

Look at your notes and find your case:

• You're named, with a link to your own site. Good. Keep your facts current and check again every month.
• You're named, but the link goes elsewhere or a detail is wrong. Open the page the link points to. If it's your Google profile, fix it there. If it's a directory or review site, claim or update your entry.
• You're not named. Open the links that came with the answers: those are the pages the assistant read. Look at what the named businesses have there that you don't: a complete Google profile, a clear website, real reviews, a listing on the same sites.

Two things not to spend on. Google says chasing “inauthentic mentions” isn't as helpful as it may seem, so never buy reviews or fake mentions. And there is “no special schema.org markup you need to add” to appear in Google's AI answers.

Nobody can promise that an assistant will name your business. What you can do is make sure that when it looks, the facts about you are there, easy to read and the same everywhere.