Does ChatGPT Recommend Your Business? How to Test It in 15 Minutes
To test whether ChatGPT recommends your business, ask it and three other assistants the same five questions a customer would ask, naming your service and town, run each question twice, and log who gets named and which sources are cited. It takes about 15 minutes, costs nothing, and shows exactly where your business is missing and why.
Why should a local business test AI recommendations?
Because customers already ask these tools for recommendations, and you cannot see the answers unless you look. ChatGPT's help centre says it can use location information to find local results, including for "near me" questions, and Perplexity says each answer comes with numbered citations to its sources. Those citations are the useful part: they show which websites the assistant trusted, and so where you need to be.
A one-off test gives you a baseline. Repeat it every month or two after making changes and you will see whether they are working.
What do you need before you start?
You need four browser tabs, a notepad or spreadsheet, and a clear idea of how customers describe what you do. Set up like this:
- Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, ideally in a private or logged-out window so past chats do not colour the answers.
- Turn off any VPN. ChatGPT estimates your location from your IP address, and its help centre notes that a VPN may affect the location it infers.
- Write down your main service in the words customers use (for example "emergency plumber", not "plumbing and heating solutions").
- List your main town plus two nearby areas you want work from.
Which prompts should you use?
Use five prompts that mirror real customer questions, always naming the place, because answers without a location are a lottery. Replace the brackets with your own details:
- "Who is a good [service] in [town]?"
- "I need a [service] in [area] urgently. Who should I call?"
- "What are the best-reviewed [trade]s near [postcode district]?"
- "Recommend a reliable [service] in [second town] for [specific job]."
- "What do you know about [your business name] in [town]?"
For a roofer in Croydon, prompt 4 might be: "Recommend a reliable roofer in Purley for a leaking flat roof." Prompt 5 is the reality check: it shows what the assistant believes about you, including old phone numbers, wrong areas or a closed branch.
Ask each prompt twice in a fresh chat. Answers vary between runs, so one answer proves little.
How do you log the results?
Log each run in one row so you can compare across assistants and over time. A simple sheet like this works:
| Date | Assistant | Prompt no. | Run | Were you named? | Position in list | Competitors named | Sources cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 Oct | ChatGPT | 1 | 1 | No | n/a | Three local firms | A directory, two websites |
| 5 Oct | ChatGPT | 1 | 2 | Yes | 3rd | Two local firms | Google listing, your website |
| 5 Oct | Perplexity | 1 | 1 | No | n/a | Two firms | A review site, a news page |
The "Sources cited" column matters most. Open a few of the cited links. If the same directory or review site keeps coming up and you are not on it, that is your first fix. If your own website is cited but with wrong details, fix the page.
How do you read the results?
Read them by asking why each named business was chosen, then checking whether the same reason applies to you. Five common patterns, and what each usually means:
- You never appear and none of your pages are cited. The assistant may not be able to read your site. Check that its search crawler is allowed, as covered in our AI search visibility checklist.
- You appear for your home town but not nearby areas. Your website and profile probably do not mention those areas clearly in text.
- Competitors appear with "highly rated" or "many reviews". Reviews are doing the work. You need a steady review routine.
- Prompt 5 returns wrong facts. Old listings or an out-of-date page are being used. Find and correct them.
- One directory dominates the citations. Make sure you are listed there with identical details.
Treat the results as clues, not a score. ChatGPT's own help centre warns that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect.
What about Gemini, AI Overviews and Copilot?
Run the same prompts on each, because they draw on different sources. Gemini works inside Google's products, and in Google Maps it can find places near you or your destination, so your Google Business Profile weighs heavily there. Google's AI Overviews in normal search use pages that are indexed and eligible for a snippet, so try your prompts as ordinary Google searches too and note whether an AI Overview appears. Copilot grounds its answers in Bing, whose guidelines now cover citations in Copilot, so check your listing in Bing Places as well.
What should you do with the results?
Pick the two or three gaps that came up most often and fix those first. Most fixes are not technical: correcting a listing, adding a page for a nearby area, asking for reviews, or rewriting a vague homepage. Our guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity explains each fix in more depth, and our online presence audit covers the wider checks on search, Maps and your website.
Then repeat the exact same prompts in four to six weeks and compare. If you would like us to run the test across more prompts and areas and turn it into a plain fix list, that is part of what we do at Oski Marketing.
What to do this week
- Run the five prompts twice each on ChatGPT and Perplexity, and log the results in the table above.
- Open every source cited for a competitor and note any directory or site where you are missing.
- Run prompt 5 on all four assistants and correct any wrong fact about your business at its source.
- Set a calendar reminder to repeat the same test in six weeks.
Frequently asked questions
Why does ChatGPT give different answers each time?
AI assistants generate a fresh answer each time and may run different searches behind the scenes, so the names can change between runs. That is why the test asks each question more than once and counts how often you appear, rather than relying on one answer.
Should I be logged in when I test?
Test both ways if you can. Being logged in can bring in saved memories and past chats, which skew results towards what you have asked before. A logged-out or private window is closer to what a new customer sees. ChatGPT's help centre confirms people who are not signed in can also use web search.
What if AI recommends a business that has closed?
It means the assistant is relying on old sources. Note which pages it cites. You cannot edit other businesses' listings, but you can make sure your own details are current and widely published, which gives the assistant better material to choose from.
Can I ask ChatGPT to recommend my business?
You can ask it about your business by name to see what it knows, and that is a useful part of the test. Asking it to promote you in your own chats does not change what it tells other people.