How to Check Whether AI Assistants Recommend Your Business

The quickest way to do this

If you want the prompts written for you, the Ask the Assistants tool generates five of them from your business type and town, ready to copy. It runs entirely in your browser, sends nothing anywhere, and needs no account. This guide explains why the prompts are shaped the way they are; the tool just saves you the typing.

Ask the assistants directly (the fastest check)

Open each assistant and ask the question a customer would actually ask, in plain words: the best [what you do] in [your town], or who should I use for [your service] near [your area].

Note three things each time: whether your business is named at all, whether the details it gives are correct, and which other businesses it names. That is your baseline.

Do this as a new, signed-out or fresh chat where you can, so a past conversation about your own business does not bias the answer.

Vary the question the way real customers do

People do not all ask the same way, so one question is not a verdict. Try a few: by service (best [specific service] in [town]), by area (a good [what you do] near [neighbourhood]), and by need (who can help me [the problem you solve]).

If you cover several areas or offer several services, test each one. You may be named for your main town but invisible for a neighbouring one, which tells you exactly where the gap is.

Check across all five assistants, not just one

The assistants people ask for recommendations are ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and Google's AI Overviews. Each draws on its own mix of training data and live web results, so being named by one does not mean being named by the others.

Run the same handful of questions through each. A business that is clearly described and consistently listed tends to show up across all of them; a patchy result across assistants usually points to inconsistent details or thin content rather than bad luck.

Read what it says about you, not just whether you appear

Being named is only half of it. Check that what the assistant says is right: your services, your areas, your specialisms, and any claims about you. An assistant confidently describing you with the wrong details, or an old phone number, is a problem to fix, not a win.

Where the description is wrong or vague, that is a signal your own site and listings are unclear or inconsistent, because that is what the assistant is summarising.

Note who it names instead of you

When you are not named, look at who is. Those are your real competitors for AI visibility, which are not always the same businesses you think of as competitors.

Look at what they do that you might not: clearer service descriptions, consistent listings, more or more recent reviews, content that answers common questions directly. That is the gap to close.

Get a systematic read, not just spot checks

Asking the assistants tells you the outcome for the questions you happened to try. To understand why, you need to look at the signals that determine whether you get named in the first place.

A free Bump scan reads your public site and scores those readiness signals, your technical foundation, content, structured data, local readiness, and reputation, into a single Bump Score with the specific gaps to fix, and needs no account. The free scan does not query the assistants, so it does not invent a citation figure. The live check of whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and Google AI actually name you, and how you compare with competitors over time, runs on the paid tiers.

What to do about a poor result

A poor result is not permanent, and fixing it is mostly not technical. Describe your business plainly, keep your name, address, phone, services, and areas identical across your site and listings, answer common questions directly on your pages, let the AI crawlers reach your site, and keep earning reviews.

Then re-check. AI visibility moves on a weekly-at-best timescale, so make your changes, give it time, and watch the trend over weeks rather than the answer on any single day.

Frequently asked questions

How can I tell if ChatGPT recommends my business?

Ask it directly, in a fresh chat: the best [what you do] in [your town]. See whether you are named and whether the details are correct. Repeat with a few different phrasings, since one question is not a verdict. Then check the other assistants too, because each uses different sources.

Which AI assistants should I check?

The ones people actually ask for recommendations: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and Google AI. Being named by one does not mean being named by the others, so check all five with the same handful of questions.

Do I need a tool to check, or can I do it myself?

You can do the basic check yourself by asking each assistant a customer's question and noting whether you are named and described correctly. A free Bump scan adds the why, scoring the readiness signals behind the result into a Bump Score with the gaps to fix; the live check of whether each assistant names you, tracked over time and against competitors, runs on the paid tiers.

The assistant named my business but got the details wrong. Why?

An assistant summarises what it can find about you across the web. Wrong or outdated details usually mean your own site and listings are inconsistent or unclear, so it is stitching together conflicting information. Making your business name, contact details, services, and areas identical everywhere is the fix.