How to Check If ChatGPT Recommends Your Business (And What to Do If It Doesn't)

This takes ten minutes. You need ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google — and you need to be honest with yourself about what you find.

Step 1: Run These Five Prompts

Open each of these three platforms and run the following queries, substituting your actual business type and location.

On ChatGPT (chat.openai.com):

On Perplexity (perplexity.ai):

On Google (google.com, look at the AI Overview at the top):

For a local law firm in Towson, these queries would look like: "Best personal injury attorneys in Towson Maryland," "Recommend a family law firm near Baltimore I can trust," and so on.

Step 2: Read the Results Honestly

Three outcomes are possible.

Your business is named directly. This is good. Note which platforms cite you and which don't — the gap tells you where to focus.

Your category is discussed but you aren't named. The AI is answering the question but recommending competitors or giving generic advice. This means you exist but aren't being treated as an authority source worth citing. This is fixable.

Your entire category gets a generic response with no specific local recommendations. This usually means the AI doesn't have reliable local business data for your area and category — a structured data and entity problem. Also fixable, but requires more foundational work.

Step 3: Check Your Entity Presence

Open Google and search for your exact business name. Does a Knowledge Panel appear on the right side of the results — the box with your hours, address, photos, and a link to your website? If it does, Google has established your business as a recognized entity. If it doesn't, your entity signals are weak.

Then check Google Maps. Is your Business Profile claimed and current? Is your address, phone number, and service description accurate? This data feeds directly into AI systems — inconsistencies here are one of the most common reasons local businesses score poorly on entity signals.

Step 4: Check Your Content Structure

Look at your website's main service pages. Ask yourself these specific questions:

Does the page answer a specific question directly, in the first two paragraphs? Does it include any statistics, data points, or cited research? Does it have a FAQ section with clear, direct answers? Are the headings descriptive and written the way someone would actually phrase a question?

If the answers are mostly no — your content is optimized for how search engines used to work, not how AI systems work today. Traditional keyword placement has no meaningful effect on generative engine visibility, according to the KDD '24 GEO research. What moves the needle is structured, cited, question-answering content.

Step 5: Know Your Score

Running these manual checks gives you a directional sense of where you stand. The MAKIF Audit gives you the precise picture — a scored assessment of 46 signals across all five AI visibility layers, with a competitor comparison and a prioritized list of what to fix first.

Most businesses that go through this process find the same things: their entity layer is thin, their content structure doesn't answer conversational queries, and they have no citation triggers anywhere on their site. Those three problems account for the majority of zero AI visibility scores we've seen in our Towson pilot.

The good news is that all three are addressable. The better news is that most of your local competitors haven't started yet.

Sources: KDD '24 GEO Research (Aggarwal et al., Columbia & Princeton) · Google Search Central — AI Features and Your Website · MAKIF Audit Framework