How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business

Ask the question your customer would ask

To check whether ChatGPT recommends your business, ask for help choosing a business like yours without including your name. Save the answer, the businesses named and any cited sources. Then repeat the check with a small set of customer questions.

“What do you know about Acme Plumbing?” tests what ChatGPT says after someone supplies the name. “Who can fix a burst pipe in Denver tonight?” tests whether the business appears during discovery. Both checks can be useful, but they answer different questions.

If you're new to the subject, answer engine optimization is the work of improving your visibility in these answers. A first check gives you something concrete to work from.

Write five to ten questions before testing

Start with questions from sales calls, contact forms or conversations with customers. Include the service, location and constraints that affect their choice. For a Denver plumber, a starter list could be:

• Who should I call for an emergency plumber in Denver?
• Which Denver plumbers repair water heaters?
• Can you recommend a plumber for an older home in Denver?
• Who fixes a leaking pipe in a Denver apartment?
• Which plumbing companies serve Denver on weekends?

These are example prompts, not findings about any business. Replace them with situations your team handles. If you serve several cities, keep the city-specific results separate so a strong showing in one market doesn't conceal an absence in another.

Keep the wording in a saved document. Editing a question between checks makes it harder to tell whether the answer changed or you asked something different.

Keep the test conditions visible

Use a fresh conversation for each question. State the city in the prompt, and record the service, date and available model or search settings. Don't introduce your business elsewhere in the conversation before asking for recommendations.

For a check of current web-based recommendations, use search where available and record whether the service returned a web-grounded answer. ChatGPT can search the web and attach citations to search-based responses, but it does not use web search for every answer. OpenAI's web search guide explains the feature.

Run the same questions across the services you want to monitor. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews are separate observations. Keep their results separate, including cases where Google returns no AI Overview or a request fails.

Save enough to inspect the result later

A useful log includes the exact question, test conditions, full answer, names mentioned and cited links. Record whether your business appears, how it is described and which other businesses appear beside it. If you record order, keep the original response: a bullet list, comparison table and passing mention have different contexts.

Read the citations. A directory, local article or service page attached to an answer can give you a place to investigate. Check whether your details are accurate and whether the source covers the question you asked. Citations do not reveal every input used to generate the answer or prove why a business was selected.

Report failed requests and missing AI Overviews separately from returned answers that omit your business. Otherwise, a service outage can look like a decline in visibility. When reporting a mention rate, show both the mention count and the number of returned answers behind it.

Repeat the check before drawing conclusions

Choose a review schedule you can maintain. A weekly review is a reasonable starting point for a small business; use the same questions and recorded conditions. Keep a dated log of profile corrections, new service pages and other work so you can compare later results with what changed.

An appearance after a website edit does not establish that the edit caused it. Look for repeated patterns, read the answers and use the findings to choose specific improvements to your public information.

AEO Monitor offers a shorter route through the check: enter a website or business description, review the suggested questions and compare the results. The free beta supports up to five questions across three AIs, with no account required. Email is optional for the weekly report.

AEO Monitor is built on Vaaya, which gives the software one balance for AI calls and a receipt for each call. The visitor enters a website and reads a report; the recipe handles those calls behind the scenes.

Save your first report alongside the questions you tested. That gives the next check a useful point of comparison.

Questions

Should I include my business name in the question?

Leave it out when testing discovery. A question that names your business tests what the assistant says about you after someone already knows you.

Does one missing mention mean my business is invisible?

No. It means your business was absent from that returned answer under the recorded conditions. Compare several relevant questions and repeat the check.

How many questions can AEO Monitor check in beta?

The free beta checks up to five questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. No account is required.