How to Check If ChatGPT Mentions Your Business (in 10 Minutes)

Before you spend a dollar on showing up in AI answers, it's worth knowing where you stand today. You can do it by hand, in about ten minutes, with no paid tool. Just open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, ask the right questions, and write down what comes back.

Step 1: ask a customer's questions, not yours

The most common mistake is searching your own business name. A customer who doesn't know you yet never does that. Ask the way someone looking for what you sell, in your city, would ask. Adapt these to your trade:

• “What's the best [your service] in [your city]?”
• “Recommend a [your business type] near [your area].”
• “Where do I take my [customer problem] in [your city]?”
• “[Your business type] with good reviews in [your city].”

Step 2: ask in the three places people actually ask

• ChatGPT. Turn on web search when you ask (the model on its own, without searching, answers from stale data). Watch which sources it links.
• Perplexity. It always cites its sources with links, so it's the easiest to read: you see at a glance which pages the answer came from.
• Google. Run the normal search and look at the AI Overview up top, the block that summarizes before the blue results.

Step 3: write down three things per answer

Open a simple sheet. For each question and each platform, note:

• Do you show up, yes or no?
• Which competitors show up in your place?
• Which sources fed the answer (Google, reviews, a directory, a blog)?

That sheet is your baseline. Without it, any change you make later is a guess. With it, you can repeat the exercise in a month and see whether you moved.

Step 4: read what you're seeing

• You're absent, competitors show up. The normal starting point. Look at their sources: it's almost always a complete Business Profile, recent reviews, and presence in a couple of directories.
• You show up, but with old data. Stale hours, address, or services. Fixed in your Business Profile and with consistent data on your site.
• Nobody clear shows up. A category with little AI competition yet. That's an opening: the first one to get their information in order takes the mention.

A couple of traps when measuring

AI answers vary: the same question can return different results on two tries, and your account history can skew what you see. Test in a private window or signed out when you can, and run each question a couple of times to get a sense of the pattern, not a single snapshot.