How to Check If AI Recommends Your Business (Free 15-Minute Audit)

To check whether AI recommends your business, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews the exact questions your customers ask, then record whether each assistant names you, names a competitor, or gets your facts wrong. It takes about 15 minutes and costs nothing. Here is the step by step audit we run on our own brands.

This matters because a large and growing share of buying decisions now start inside an assistant instead of a search results page. Sam Altman said ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users when he spoke at OpenAI's DevDay in October 2025 (TechCrunch, October 2025). Perplexity reported 780 million queries in the single month of May 2025 (Perplexity, 2025). When one of those people asks "who does X near me," a short list of specific businesses comes back. You want to know, today, whether you are on that list.

What does it mean for AI to recommend my business?

It means that when someone asks an assistant a real question, your name shows up in the written answer, described accurately, ideally with a link. There is no page two and no map pack to scroll. The assistant names a handful of businesses and moves on, so being mentioned or being invisible are the only two outcomes that count.

That is different from ranking on Google. You can sit on page one of a normal search and still never appear in an AI answer, because assistants assemble recommendations from the clearest, most consistent evidence they can find across the whole web, not just from your Google position. The audit below tells you which side of that line you are on right now.

How do I run the 15-minute AI visibility audit?

You need a phone or laptop, a browser, and a timer. Do not sign in to anything paid. The free tier of each assistant is what most of your customers use, so it is the honest test.

Minutes 0 to 2: Write down five real questions. List the five things a customer actually types before they buy from you. Use your service plus your location, the way a person speaks. For example: "best commercial electrician in Minneapolis," "who does emergency furnace repair in Bloomington," or "affordable family dentist near Uptown." Avoid your brand name. You already know AI can find you if it searches your business by name. The test is whether it finds you when it does not know you exist.

Minutes 2 to 5: Ask ChatGPT. Open ChatGPT, turn search on, and paste your five questions one at a time. For each answer, write down three things: did it name you, which competitors did it name instead, and did it get any of your facts wrong.

Minutes 5 to 8: Ask Perplexity. Do the same five questions in Perplexity. Perplexity always shows its sources, so note whether your website appears in the citation list, even when your name is not in the summary. Being cited but not summarized is a useful in-between signal.

Minutes 8 to 11: Ask Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Run the questions in Gemini, then type the same queries into Google itself and read the AI Overview at the top of the results. Record the same three data points each time.

Minutes 11 to 13: Score your results. Use the simple grid below. Tally how many of your five questions surfaced you across the four assistants.

Minutes 13 to 15: Do two fast checks. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser and scan for OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, or PerplexityBot under a Disallow line, because blocking them by accident is common and quietly fatal. Then pull up your Google Business Profile and confirm your name, address, phone, and hours are correct. If AI never mentions you at all, these two are usually the first culprits, which we walk through in why your business isn't showing up in ChatGPT.

How do I score what I find?

Keep it to one row per question. You are not grading essays, you are counting mentions.

What the assistant did	What it means	Score
Named you clearly and accurately	You are the answer for that question	Win
Cited your site but did not name you	Close, needs clearer, more quotable content	Partial
Named only competitors	You are invisible for that question	Miss
Named you but got a fact wrong	Trust and consistency problem to fix	Miss
Refused or gave a generic non-answer	Neutral, retest in a month	Skip

Add up the wins across all four assistants and 20 possible slots. If you land above 15, your foundation is strong and you are refining. Between 5 and 15, you have real gaps worth closing this quarter. Below 5, treat it as a priority, because your competitors are getting the mention you are not.

Why does AI recommend a competitor instead of me?

Almost always because it found stronger, clearer, more consistent evidence for them. Assistants favor answers they can corroborate. Your own homepage saying you are the best counts for little. A complete Google Business Profile, consistent business facts across directories, and pages that answer the exact question in plain language count for a lot.

Three gaps cause most misses. Your important content only loads after JavaScript, so a crawler sees a nearly empty page. Your name, address, and phone disagree across the web, so a model hesitates to trust any one version. Or your pages never plainly state what you do and where, so the assistant would rather quote a competitor who did. We lay out the full fix order in the Minneapolis small business guide to AI search visibility.

How often should I run this audit?

Monthly is a sensible rhythm for most local businesses. The live web moves, models refresh, and a fix you made in week one can start showing up weeks later. Running the same five questions each month turns a one-time snapshot into a trend line, so you can see whether your changes are actually moving the needle or not.

Frequently asked questions

Does this audit cost anything? No. Every assistant in this audit has a free tier that answers local questions, and that free tier is what most of your customers use. You do not need a paid subscription to any of them to run the full 15-minute check.

Should I ask the assistant about my business by name? Not for the real test. Asking "what do you know about my company" only tells you what AI can find when it already knows who you are. The valuable question is whether you surface for an unbranded query like "best roofer in St. Paul," because that is how a new customer actually searches.

What if AI gets my hours or address wrong? Treat it as a miss and fix the source. Wrong facts usually trace back to an outdated Google Business Profile or inconsistent directory listings. Correct them at the source, keep every listing identical, and the assistants generally catch up as they refresh.

Is a low score a website problem or a content problem? Often both, plus your off-site presence. A slow or JavaScript-heavy site can hide your content from crawlers, thin pages give assistants nothing quotable to lift, and inconsistent listings undercut trust. The audit's two fast checks point you at whichever is worst first.

Want a second set of eyes on your results, or a full picture across more assistants and questions than a 15-minute check can cover? Check your AI visibility and we will show you exactly which questions surface your business and which ones hand the customer to someone else.