How to Check If ChatGPT Recommends Your Business (Exact Prompts to Try)

More buyers every month ask an AI assistant for a recommendation and act on the answer without ever seeing a search results page. Which raises a question few business owners can answer: what does the AI say about you? Here is how to find out in about 15 minutes — no tools required.

Why does this matter now?

AI assistants compose recommendations from sources they can crawl and trust. If your business is invisible to them, you are not losing rankings — you are absent from the conversation entirely. And unlike rankings, you will not see it happen: there is no analytics line for "recommendations you did not get".

The exact prompts to try

Open a fresh session (no memory, no signed-in history) in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI mode, and ask each one:

1. "What is [your business name] and what do they do?" — tests whether you exist to the model and how accurately you are described.
2. "Best [your service] for [your customer type]" — e.g., "best workflow automation agency for small businesses". The commercial money question.
3. "Who should I hire to [the problem you solve]?" — e.g., "who should I hire to automate my invoice processing?"
4. "[Your business name] reviews — is it legit?" — tests what trust signals the assistant can find.
5. "Alternatives to [your best-known competitor]" — tests whether you appear in comparison sets.

How do you read the results?

Score each answer three ways: presence (did you appear at all?), accuracy (is the description current and right?), and citation (which page of yours did it link — if any?). Perplexity is the most useful diagnostic because it shows sources for every answer — if it cites a directory instead of your website, the directory is outranking you inside the AI's evidence set.

Why do businesses not show up?

• AI crawlers are blocked. Some robots.txt files, firewalls, and bot-protection tools silently reject GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and friends (see OpenAI's crawler documentation).
• Pages never state the obvious. If no page says plainly what you do, who you serve, and where, a machine cannot summarize it.
• No structured data. Without schema.org markup, assistants must guess at your services, hours, and area.
• Nothing worth citing. Assistants cite pages with specifics — numbers, comparisons, honest answers to real questions — not brochure adjectives.

How do you fix it? (Five steps)

1. Verify AI crawlers can reach your site — check robots.txt and your firewall's bot rules.
2. Add structured data: your business entity, services, and FAQs marked up on the pages themselves.
3. Publish an llms.txt — a machine-readable summary of who you are and which pages matter.
4. Write answer-first pages for the exact questions buyers ask the assistants.
5. Re-run the prompts monthly and track presence, accuracy, and citations.

This is precisely the work our GEO service does — for clients worldwide and for businesses near our base (see AI automation in Cebu). The first step is free: our automation and visibility audit tells you where you stand before you spend anything.