How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business: a practical checklist

Short answer

The check has five steps: gather real customer questions, ask them in the right context (language, city), repeat them several times, do this across several AI platforms and record the results in a spreadsheet. A single ChatGPT answer proves nothing — you can only draw conclusions from a series of answers.

Step 1. Make a list of customer questions

Don’t ask about your brand; ask the way someone who doesn’t know you yet would. It’s in these answers that AI decides whom to recommend.

• Choice questions: “which pizzeria to choose in Camden”, “best children’s dentist in Manchester”.
• Comparison questions: “X or Y — which is better for a flat renovation”.
• Questions with constraints: “a hotel in Edinburgh with a pool for under £150 a night”.
• Questions about your brand: “what is known about [name]”, “what are the prices at [name]” — to see whether AI describes you correctly.

10–20 questions are enough to start. Take the wording from calls, emails, reviews and queries in Google Search Console.

Step 2. Ask in your customer’s language and from their city

Answers for London and Berlin, in English and in German, can differ considerably. If your customers write in English, check in English; if you sell in Germany, check in German.

It’s best to name the city directly in the question (“in Bristol”). AI platforms may also take the user’s approximate location into account, so checking from another city or through a VPN will give a different result. For a clean check, open a new conversation or a temporary chat so your previous queries don’t influence the answer.

Step 3. Repeat: one answer isn’t enough

An AI answer is generated afresh each time. Today you’re named, tomorrow you’re not, even though nothing has changed on your website. So:

• ask each question at least 3–5 times on different days;
• count the share of answers that mention your brand, rather than a simple “yes/no”;
• compare weeks and months, not individual days.

Step 4. Check several platforms

A brand can be visible in ChatGPT and missing from Gemini, because these systems rely on different sources. More on Google in how to get into Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Step 5. Look at which sources the answer relies on

The links under an answer show where AI took its information from. This is the most useful part of the check: you can see which directories, media, rankings and competitor websites shape the answer.

In our monitoring (3,057 AI answers for several Ukrainian brands, since 28 September 2026), 53% of answers included links to sources. Among them, the brand’s own website was cited in 54%, media, blogs and other sites also in 54%, competitor websites in 36%, and maps and local directories in 20%. So in roughly half of cases, AI relies not on your website but on what others write about you. More on this in which sources AI relies on.

Step 6. Record the results

The simplest option is a spreadsheet with columns: date, platform, question, whether the brand is named, whether it’s recommended, which competitors, which sources, whether there are factual errors. Flag errors separately: wrong prices, opening hours, address. What to do about them is covered in what to do when AI gets your details wrong.

After a month, the spreadsheet will show a trend: the share of answers that mention you, the most frequent competitors and the websites worth “winning over”.

Manually or with a monitoring service

Manually — free and useful for getting to know the topic. But 20 questions × 4 platforms × several repeats means hundreds of answers a month. Manually, it’s realistic to check once a week with a short list of questions.

A monitoring service does the same automatically, every day. For example, AI Visibility puts your customers’ questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode — in your customers’ language and as if from their city. It calculates share of voice, mention and recommendation rates and citations of your website, and every figure opens up to the actual answers and sources. For a comparison of tools, see AI visibility tracking tools.

No service can guarantee that AI will recommend you. Monitoring shows what’s happening now and what changes after you act.

Common mistakes when checking

• Only asking “what do you know about [brand]” — this doesn’t show whether you’re being recommended.
• Drawing conclusions from a single answer.
• Checking only ChatGPT, and only in one language.
• Ignoring sources: they’re what tell you what to do next.

How to check this for your business

Start with the free live check: enter your brand and a customer question, and in 20–60 seconds you’ll see a real ChatGPT answer. To get daily data from all four platforms and an action plan, use the free first week.