How to Tell Whether ChatGPT Recommends Your Business

Most businesses have no idea what AI assistants say about them. Not a vague idea, none at all. They track Google rankings weekly and have never once typed their own category into ChatGPT to see who comes back.

The uncomfortable part is that the answer is often confidently wrong. A competitor named instead of you. A service you stopped offering. Occasionally a business with a similar name in a different country.

I have written before about what AEO is and why it matters. This is the narrower question: how do you actually find out where you stand?

The short answer

Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask, write down what comes back, and repeat it monthly. It is unglamorous and it is the only reliable method available today.

Ask the buying question, not your own name

Searching your own brand tells you almost nothing. Of course it knows your name if you have a website.

The question that matters is the one a customer asks before they know you exist:

• "Who does water damage restoration in my area?"
• "Best taxi dispatch software for a small fleet"
• "Should I hire a freelance app developer or an agency?"

Ask those. Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, because they do not agree with each other and they do not draw on the same sources.

Write down four things every time

Keep it in a spreadsheet. It is a five-minute job that becomes valuable in month three when you have something to compare against.

• Were you mentioned at all? Yes or no, nothing more complicated.
• Where in the answer? First is worth far more than fifth.
• Was it accurate? Right services, right area, right description.
• What did it cite? The sources listed underneath are the entire ballgame.

The citations tell you what to fix

This is the part people skip and it is the only part that leads to action.

If the assistant recommends a competitor and cites a directory listing, a forum thread and a comparison article, then the fix is not your homepage. The fix is being present and accurate in those three places.

Answers are assembled from sources the model can find and trusts. Change the sources and the answer changes. Polish your own website copy and it usually does not.

Why it says the wrong thing

In practice it is almost always one of these:

• Nothing to find. A new site with no other mentions anywhere. The model has no reason to believe you exist.
• Stale sources. An old listing describing services you dropped two years ago.
• Confusion. Another business with a similar name, and nothing distinguishing you.
• No structured data. Nothing on your site plainly states what you do, where, and for whom.

Fix the sources, in order

Start with the ones you control and work outward. Your own site's structured data and a clear plain-English description of what you do. Then your profiles, Google Business, industry directories, anywhere that already ranks. Then the genuinely earned mentions, which are slow and worth the most.

Write pages that answer questions directly in the first paragraph. Assistants lift answers, and a page that buries the answer under four paragraphs of preamble rarely gets used.

Be honest about the timescale

Nothing here works in a fortnight. Models update on their own schedule, and a business with no external footprint will not appear in AI answers next month regardless of what it does. If someone promises otherwise, they are selling something.

What it costs

Checking is free, takes an hour a month, and you can do it yourself today. Fixing what you find is SEO and AEO work, and the estimator gives a range for a project.

If you would like to know where you stand, run the five questions your customers actually ask and send me what came back. I will tell you whether it is a content problem, a citation problem, or simply a site too new to be known yet, and the last one only needs patience.