How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business

Why a casual look tells you nothing

Most people test this by typing their own company name into ChatGPT. That answers the wrong question. Of course it knows your name once you've given it. What matters is whether you come out of an answer when nobody has mentioned you at all.

The other trap is asking once. These systems often won't return the same answer twice, and they can personalise to your history. One favourable answer is an anecdote. A set of questions asked the same way, on a schedule, is evidence.

Write the questions your customers would ask

Between ten and fifteen is enough. Write them as a buyer would, not as a marketer would. Never name your own business in them.

• Who's the best [your service] in [your town]?
• I need a [your service] for [a specific situation]. Who should I call?
• Recommend three [your service] firms near [your area] and say why.
• Who are the most reputable [your service] specialists in [your region]?
• What should I look for in a [your service], and who does it well locally?

Then freeze the wording. The moment you reword a question you lose the ability to compare this month with last month, and comparison is the entire point.

How to ask so the answer is honest

• Sign out, or use a private window. A logged-in account carries your history, and your history includes your own business.
• Turn off memory and custom instructions where the assistant offers them.
• Ask each question in a brand-new conversation. Follow-ups in the same thread inherit the earlier answer.
• Check more than one assistant. ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Claude frequently disagree, and your customers don't all use the same one.
• Ask from the location your customers are in, not from wherever you happen to be.

What to write down

For each question, on each assistant, record four things: whether you were named at all, the position you were named in, which competitors were named, and which web pages the answer cited. That last one is the most useful and the most ignored — the cited sources tell you exactly which pages an assistant trusts on your subject, which is the map for everything you do next.

Keep the raw answer text too. Summaries lose the wording, and the wording is often where the useful detail is: being called "a good budget option" is not the same result as being called "the specialist for complex cases".

Reading the result honestly

Three distinctions matter, and most reporting blurs them. A mention is your name appearing. A recommendation is being put forward as a choice. A citation is one of your pages being used as a source. They are not the same, and a business can have plenty of one and none of the others.

Don't average across assistants either. An average of four different systems describes nothing that any real customer experiences.

How often to repeat it

Monthly is the right rhythm for most businesses. Often enough to catch a change, not so often that you're reacting to noise. Do it on roughly the same date each month and keep every set of answers — the archive becomes far more valuable than any single result.

If you'd rather not run it yourself

This is precisely what Preselected does as a managed service: the same questions every month across four assistants, recorded properly, then the work to improve what can genuinely be influenced, then a plain report of what changed. £1,000 a month, cancel whenever.