How To Check If ChatGPT Recommends Your Business (10 Prompts To Try)

It takes five minutes to find out if ChatGPT is sending customers to you or to the guy down the road.

Most owners have never looked.

Here are the exact prompts to type, how to read what comes back, and what to do if your name isn't there.

Set up a fair test first

ChatGPT doesn't give everyone the same answer. A few quick steps keep your test honest.

• Start a new chat. ChatGPT can remember earlier conversations. If you've told it about your business before, it may lean your way. A fresh chat, or a temporary chat, shows you what a stranger sees.
• Name your town. Don't write "near me". Write "in Mesa" or "in north Austin". That's the answer you can compare from one test to the next.
• Ask like a customer. Leave your business name out of the first few prompts. You want to know if it thinks of you on its own.
• Ask more than once. Answers shift every time. Run each prompt three times and look for the names that keep coming up.

The 10 prompts to try

Swap in your own trade, town and services wherever you see square brackets.

Would it recommend you?

Start with the questions a new customer would ask.

1. "Who are the best [roofers] in [Dallas]?"
2. "I need a [plumber] in [Mesa] this week. Who should I call?"
3. "Which [dentist] in [Plano] has the best reviews?"
4. "Recommend a reliable, fairly priced [electrician] near [Ballard, Seattle]."

Does it know your specialty?

Now get specific. This is where smaller businesses often do well.

1. "Who installs [tankless water heaters] in [Boise]?"
2. "I need a [roofer] in [Tulsa] who [handles insurance claims for hail damage]. Who do you suggest?"

What does it know about you?

Now use your name.

1. "What can you tell me about [your business name] in [your town]?"
2. "Is [your business name] a good choice for [service]? What do customers say about them?"
3. "Compare [your business name] and [a competitor] for [service] in [your town]."

Where did it get that?

Finish with the most useful prompt of the lot.

1. "Why did you recommend those businesses? Which websites did you use?"

How to read the results

Write down three things for each prompt: who got named, the reason given, and the websites it pointed to.

Then see which of these fits you.

• You're named, and the details are right. Good. Keep going, and check again next month. Your competitors are working on this too.
• You're named, but something's wrong. A wrong phone number, old hours, a service you dropped. That's coming from somewhere. Usually an old directory listing or an out-of-date page on your own site.
• You're not named, but it knows you when asked. It can find you. It just doesn't see enough reason to pick you over the others.
• It doesn't know you at all. There isn't enough written about your business online for AI to work with. That's the most urgent one to fix.

Look at the reasons too. When ChatGPT says it picked a business because it "specializes in storm damage" or "offers same-day service", it read that somewhere, usually on that business's own website or in its reviews. If you offer the same thing and it didn't say so about you, your site isn't saying it clearly enough.

Pay close attention to prompt 10. The websites ChatGPT says it used are your to-do list. If it's leaning on a directory you're not on, or a "best of" article that left you out, you know where to start.

Check the other AI tools too

Your customers don't all use ChatGPT. Run the first few prompts in Claude and Perplexity as well. Perplexity shows its sources next to every answer, which makes it easy to see what it's reading.

Then search Google for your main service and town. If a written summary appears above the normal results, that's one of Google's AI Overviews. See who's in it.

What to do if ChatGPT doesn't name you

AI can only recommend what it can read. So give it more to read, and make it clearer.

1. Study who it did name. Look at their websites. They almost always list every service, name every town and answer common questions.
2. Make your own website that clear. One page per main service. The areas you cover, by name. Straight answers on price, timing and what's included.
3. Fix your listings. Same name, phone number, address and hours on your Google Business Profile and every directory.
4. Get reviews that mention the job and the town. Those are the details AI repeats when it explains why it picked someone.
5. Test again in a few weeks. Same prompts, fresh chat.

For the full picture of how these answers get built, read how customers find local businesses with ChatGPT.

The easy way: let us check for you

Typing ten prompts three times each, across three tools, takes a while. We do the legwork for you, free.

And if the answer isn't the one you wanted, we fix it. Getting local businesses recommended by ChatGPT is what we do. It's part of our $99/month plan, along with a free website and Google rankings. Here's how our ChatGPT SEO works.