Is your business recommended by ChatGPT? How to check

Type the question a customer would type, not your business name. A bookkeeper in Richardson, TX would test something like: who should I hire to do the books for a small business in Richardson, TX. Read the answer and look for your name. Then run the same question in Gemini, in Perplexity and in Claude.

Change the wording and run it again. Buyers ask for the best one, the cheapest one, the one who handles a specific thing, the one near a particular neighborhood. Each phrasing pulls back a different set of names. A firm that gets named for one question is often absent from the next one.

Keep a written record as you go. You will not remember which answers mentioned you and which did not.

• Use the words a buyer uses, and include your service and your city.
• Run each question at least three times, in a new chat each time.
• Write down every business named, not just whether you were named.
• Repeat in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude: they disagree more than you would expect.

AI answers vary from one run to the next. The same question asked twice can come back with two different lists of firms, so one run tells you almost nothing about whether you are usually named.

A check inside your own account is worse than a cold one. The assistant has your chat history and your location. If you have ever pasted your own website into it, your name is already sitting in the conversation. You end up reading an answer shaped around you rather than the answer a stranger gets.

What carries information is the trend. Say you were named in 3 of 48 questions this month and 9 of 48 next month: that movement is worth something. One good answer on a Tuesday is not.

No, though it is the obvious first test. If you type your business name in and the assistant describes you correctly, you have learned one thing: it can find your website. You have not learned whether it recommends you to someone who has never heard of you.

The question that decides who gets the work is the one a buyer asks without any names in it. Who should I hire. Who is good at this. In those answers the assistant names a few firms out of hundreds and leaves the rest out: across 5,174 AI answers stored in our database on 4 October 2026, the typical answer named 3 businesses.

Yes, because the four assistants disagree far more often than they agree. On 4 October 2026 we looked at 16,428 cases where a business was named for a question that all four assistants had been asked in the same run. In 91% of those cases only one of the four had named it. All four agreed 0.3% of the time.

So a result from one assistant tells you little about the other three, in either direction. Perplexity and ChatGPT do show their sources, which at least lets you see which pages an answer leaned on, and gives you somewhere to start.

Most of them, in the city we have counted firm by firm. On 7 September 2026 we tracked 375 accounting firms in Richardson, TX by name and put the questions local buyers ask to all four assistants. Across 192 answers holding 628 recommendations, only 152 of those 375 firms were named even once, about 41%.

More than half the firms in that city were never mentioned by any of the four. Those firms are not badly run. They are missing from the places the assistants read.

Richardson is one city and accountants are one trade, so read that share as an indication rather than a rule for your own market.

Assistants name businesses they can find and corroborate somewhere other than your own website. We start every fix plan with the Google Business Profile and recent reviews, because that is the record which confirms you are a real business doing a named service in a named place.

From there they lean on the listing sites your industry uses, on roundup articles about the best firms in your city, on public forum threads where someone asks for a recommendation, and on what your own site says in plain words. The assistants that cite sources will name those sites for you.

Topic by topic, your pages decide it. An answer quotes a page that addresses the question asked, so with no page on a topic you have given it nothing of yours to use, however much of that work you do.

Doing it by hand means putting dozens of questions to four assistants, several times each, and keeping notes you can compare next month. AI Mention Score puts to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude 48 of the questions people in your city ask when choosing who to hire, records every answer word for word, and counts how often your business is named. The score reads: named in X of 48 questions.

A check tells you where you stand and fixes nothing on its own. A score of zero is common on a first run, and reading it does not change the week you are having. What it gives you is a baseline instead of a guess, and the specific questions and competitors to work on.

Run a free check: enter your website and the first run covers all four assistants. It works for any business customers find by asking who to hire. The free plan stays free and re-checks every month, and it gives you:

• your score, named in X of 48 questions
• who gets recommended instead of you
• what each assistant said, word for word
• your first fix in full