You don't need an agency to find out whether AI recommends your business. You need ten minutes, your phone, and the honesty to type your own trade into a chatbot and look at the result. Here's the exact check we run at the start of every audit — free, step by step.
Set a timer. Let's go.
Minutes 0–3: Ask ChatGPT what your customers ask
Open chatgpt.com (no account needed for basic use) and ask three questions the way a real customer would — not the way you'd describe yourself. Use this pattern:
- "Who is the best [what you do] near [your town]?"
- "Recommend a [what you do] in [your area] for [your ideal customer's situation]."
- A specific one: "[Your specialty] in [town] — who should I use?"
For a Paarl guesthouse, that might be: "Best guesthouse in Paarl?", "Recommend somewhere romantic to stay near Paarl for a couple's weekend", "Pet-friendly guesthouse Paarl?"
Write down who gets named in each answer. Is it you? Which competitors keep appearing?
Minutes 3–5: Repeat in Perplexity — and note the sources
Go to perplexity.ai and ask the same three questions. Perplexity does something wonderful for our purposes: it shows its citations — the actual web pages it built the answer from.
Look at those sources carefully. They're usually round-up articles ("Top 10 guesthouses in the Winelands"), review platforms, and directories. This is the reading list AI uses to form opinions about your industry. Are you on any of those pages? Now you know exactly where the recommendation game is being played in your niche — keep that list.
Minutes 5–7: Check Google's AI
Search your three questions in normal Google and look for the AI-generated answer at the top of the results (and try gemini.google.com with the same questions). Google's AI answers lean heavily on Google Business Profiles and reviews, so this tests a different part of your visibility than ChatGPT does.
Minutes 7–9: Audit your own paper trail
Now flip the lens and look at what the AI sees when it checks you:
- Google your business name. Does your Google Business Profile appear? Are the hours, phone number, photos and services current — or is it showing 2022?
- Open your website's homepage. Within five seconds of reading, is it obvious what you do, where, and for whom? If a stranger couldn't tell, neither can a machine.
- Check your reviews. When was your most recent Google review? If it's months old, the AI is reading silence.
Minute 9–10: Score yourself
Count how many of your six AI queries (three in ChatGPT, three in Perplexity) named your business:
- 5–6: Excellent — you're an AI favourite. Your job now is defending that position, because your competitors are about to read articles like this one.
- 2–4: Partial visibility. You're in the conversation but losing specific, high-intent queries — usually the most valuable ones.
- 0–1: You're invisible to AI. Customers asking these questions are being handed to your competitors, and the volume of people asking grows every month.
What to do with your result
If you scored low, the causes are almost always the ones we unpack in how ChatGPT decides which businesses to recommend: thin independent mentions, inconsistent business information, a website that doesn't answer questions, and a stalled review pipeline. All fixable — methodically, signal by signal.
You can absolutely start yourself: update your Google Business Profile today and ask your next five happy customers for a review this week. Those two moves alone put you ahead of most local competitors.
And if you'd like the full picture — where you stand across 8+ AI tools, which specific gaps are costing you recommendations, and a prioritised fix list — that's our audit.
Get your free AI visibility audit → Five minutes of your time; we do the rest.