Most owners find out they have a problem by accident. Someone mentions they asked ChatGPT for a recommendation, and you realise you have no idea what it said.
You can find out in about five minutes. Here is how to do it properly, and how to read what comes back.
Ask the question a customer would ask
The mistake almost everyone makes on the first try is asking about themselves by name. That tells you nothing useful. Your customers do not know your name yet — that is the entire problem you are trying to solve.
Ask the way they would:
- "Who is the best plumber in Austin?"
- "I need an emergency electrician near Shoreditch, who should I call?"
- "Recommend a bookkeeper for a small construction company in Leeds"
Use your trade, your town, and the problem your customer actually has. If you serve a region rather than a city, ask the way someone in each part of it would.
Run it more than once
Assistants do not give the same answer twice. They sample, so the wording and sometimes the businesses change between runs.
Ask the same question five times in a fresh chat each time, and keep a tally of which businesses get named. One appearance in five is a very different position from five in five, and you cannot tell them apart from a single answer.
Start a new chat for each run. If you keep asking in the same conversation, the assistant is reading its own earlier answers and will repeat itself.
Check more than ChatGPT
ChatGPT still sends the most traffic, but it is no longer the whole story. Gemini has taken a large share in under a year, and Perplexity users tend to be closer to making a decision when they ask.
They pull from different sources and disagree with each other more often than you would expect. Being named in one is not being named in all three.
Reading what comes back
There are only three outcomes, and each means something different.
Your name appears. Good. Now check what is said about you — assistants routinely get opening hours, service areas and specialisms wrong, and a confident wrong answer costs you the job just as surely as no answer.
A competitor appears and you do not. They are being quoted from sources you are not in. That is usually directories, review sites and local press rather than anything on their own website.
Nobody local appears. The assistant falls back on national chains, a directory listing, or a vague non-answer. This is the most common result in most trades, and it is the best position to start from: the first local business to get this right takes the whole category.
Why your website is not the fix
The instinct is to go and rewrite your home page. It will not move the needle much on its own.
Roughly two thirds of what an assistant says about a business comes from somewhere other than that business's own site. Directories, review platforms, forum threads, local news, supplier pages. You can write the most beautiful page on the internet and still not be in the answer, because the answer was assembled from everywhere else.
That is the part that surprises people who have spent money on SEO. Ranking first on Google does not carry over. Different machine, different question, different sources.
What to do with what you found
Write down, for each question you asked: who got named, how often, and anything said about you that is wrong. That document is the whole starting point. Everything after it is just fixing the sources, in order of how much they are costing you.
If you would rather not do it by hand across three assistants and a dozen phrasings, that is exactly what our free check is.