Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Business? How to Check, and What to Do

A customer who used to type "best dentist in Austin" into Google may now ask ChatGPT or Gemini the same thing in a full sentence, and get three names back. If yours is not one of them, you were never in the running. So the question "does ChatGPT recommend my business?" is a fair one. Here is how I answer it without fooling myself.

How do you check, by hand?

Open the assistant and ask what a customer would ask: "Which plumber should I call for a leak in Lyon?", not "Tell me about Dumas Plumbing". The first tests whether you are recommended. The second only tests whether the assistant has heard of you.

Then ask again. And again tomorrow. This is the part most people skip.

Why do you get a different answer every time?

Because an AI assistant does not look up a fixed list. It composes an answer, and two answers to the same question can name different businesses. One test proves nothing in either direction: being named once does not mean you are recommended, and being absent once does not mean you are invisible.

That is why I refuse to talk about an "AI ranking". What can be measured honestly is a mention rate: across a set of questions, each asked several times, in what share of the answers does your business appear? Locametra calls this AI Mention Coverage, and an AI visibility tracker computes it for you on a schedule.

Where do assistants get their information?

When an assistant searches the web before answering, it cites its sources. Look at them closely: they are often directories, review platforms, "best of" articles from local media, and sometimes the businesses' own websites.

This tells you where to act. If every answer about restaurants in your city cites the same two review sites and you are not on them, you know what to do next.

What can you actually influence?

I see four levers, none of them specific to AI:

• *A complete and accurate Google Business Profile.*
• The same name, address and phone number everywhere. See NAP consistency.
• A website that says plainly what you do, where, and for whom. An assistant quotes clear sentences, not slogans.
• Reviews, recent and regular. They are among the things an assistant summarises.

What should you be wary of?

Of anyone selling a guaranteed place in AI answers. Nobody controls what an assistant writes. Also keep in mind that answers obtained through a technical interface can differ from what a person sees in the consumer app: a measurement is an indication, not a certainty.

Summary

My view: treat AI visibility as a consequence of doing local basics well, measured with a little more patience.