Get Cited Local guide · Updated September 2026

Is my business on ChatGPT? How to check in ten minutes

More customers now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of scrolling through search results. Here is how to find out whether the assistant names you, what a blank answer really means, and what you can do about it.

How AI assistants choose which businesses to name

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or a Google AI Overview for "a good plumber in Boise," the assistant does not run an ad auction and it does not check who paid for a listing. It pulls together what it can read about businesses in that city and names the ones it can describe with confidence.

That confidence comes from three things. First, clear facts: the assistant needs to know what you do, where you are, and how to reach you, in a form software can read. Second, agreement: those facts should match across your website, your Google Business Profile, Yelp, and the other directories the assistant has seen. Third, relevance: somewhere on the web there should be a page that answers the customer's actual question, in the customer's words, with your city named.

Businesses that have all three tend to get named. Businesses that have none of them tend to get skipped, even when they are excellent at the work. Quality signals such as reviews matter too, but they are only part of it; the assistant also needs facts it can confirm.

This matters more than it did a year ago. About 45% of US consumers used AI tools such as ChatGPT for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before (BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026). And ranking well on Google is not the same as being recommended by AI. In retail, only about 45% of the brands most visible in traditional local search were also among those AI platforms recommended most (SOCi Local Visibility Index, 2026).

How to check for yourself

You can get a useful first read in about ten minutes. The goal is to see what a real customer sees, so copy the conditions a customer would be in.

1. Ask the exact question a customer would ask, with your city in it. Not "tell me about" your business by name. The assistant will happily describe you if you name yourself, and that tells you nothing. Ask the buying question: "Who is a good family dentist in Fort Collins?" or "Which HVAC company in Chandler can do a same-day repair?"
2. Do it logged out, or in a fresh private window. If you are signed in and have ever mentioned your business to the assistant, it may remember and favor you. A customer has no such history. Use an incognito window or a logged-out session so you see the neutral answer.
3. Try at least three phrasings. Customers do not all ask the same way. Try a short version ("best roofer Tulsa"), a full sentence ("I need someone to replace my roof in Tulsa, who should I call?"), and a specific version ("roofing contractor in Tulsa that handles insurance claims"). Write down who gets named each time.
4. Repeat on a second engine. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews read different sources and answer differently. Being named on one does not mean you are named on the others. Check at least two.
5. Note who does appear. The names that show up are your real competition for AI referrals, whether or not they are your competition on Google. Keep the list. It is useful later.

What "not mentioned" actually means

If you asked nine questions and your business never came up, resist the two most common reactions. The first is "the AI is broken." It is not broken. It simply did not find enough about you to include you. The second is "there is nothing I can do." There is quite a lot you can do.

A missing result usually traces back to one of a few problems:

• The assistant cannot read your facts. Your website may state what you do in a photo, a PDF, or a design that software cannot interpret. There may be no structured data (schema markup) telling it "this is a business, here is its category, here is its address."
• Your facts disagree with each other. Your site says "Suite 200," Google says "Ste 2," Yelp has your old phone number. To a person, that is obviously the same company. To software matching records, it looks like three uncertain businesses instead of one confident one.
• Nothing on the web answers the question. Your homepage says "Welcome to Smith and Sons" and lists services. It never says, in plain words, "We replace roofs in Tulsa and we handle insurance claims." The assistant is looking for a match to the customer's question, and there is not one.
• A competitor simply has more corroboration. They have been mentioned in a local news article, a supplier directory, a chamber of commerce page. Each mention is another source agreeing they exist and do what they say.

Notice that none of these are about how good you are. They are about how legible you are. That is the good news, because legibility is fixable.

What a missing result does not mean: it does not mean you have been penalized, and it does not mean a competitor has paid for placement. It also does not mean you can buy your way in. No one can promise a specific AI answer, and anyone who guarantees one is guessing.

What to do about it

If you want to work on this yourself, take the three causes in order.

Make your facts machine-readable. Add LocalBusiness schema markup to your website with your exact name, address, phone, hours, and service area. Make sure your Google Business Profile is claimed, complete, and in the right category. Put your name, address and phone in plain text on your site, not only in an image.

Make your facts agree. Pick one exact version of your name, address and phone. Then go through Google, Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, and any industry directories you are in, and make them match character for character. This is tedious. It is also the single most common fix.

Publish a page that answers the question. For each service people actually ask about, write a short page that says what you do, where you do it, and what it typically involves, with the city named in the heading and the first paragraph. Answer the question the way you would on the phone.

Then re-check in three or four weeks using the same three phrasings, logged out, on the same engines. Compare against your notes.

If you would rather not do the checking by hand, that is what the free scan on our homepage is for. It researches one buying question the way a customer would ask it and shows you the answer, who was named, and why. The paid report goes further, running 25 buyer-intent prompts so you can see the pattern instead of a snapshot. Our guide on why AI recommends your competitor explains the three causes in more depth, and the AI visibility checklist turns them into an afternoon of work.