Does ChatGPT recommend your business? A two-minute test.
Open ChatGPT in a Temporary Chat, paste the 10 prompts below one at a time with your city and service filled in, and mark whether your business is named, linked and described correctly. Two minutes. By our scoring, if you are named in at least 2 of the 6 prompts that do not mention you, you are in the mix. Fewer, and your competitors are getting the recommendation.
Run it before you spend on AI search work. It tells you what kind of problem you have.
Set up the test so the answer is clean
Three settings keep the result clean.
Use a Temporary Chat. OpenAI's Temporary Chat FAQ says ChatGPT won't be aware of previous conversations or access memories in a Temporary Chat. Without it, ChatGPT knows you because you told it.
Turn off custom instructions, or test from a colleague's account. The same FAQ says Temporary Chat still follows custom instructions. If yours mention your company, the test is contaminated.
Mind your location. OpenAI's help article on ChatGPT search says ChatGPT uses general location based on your IP address to make results more accurate. If you test from Dallas for a Fort Worth audience, put "Fort Worth" in every prompt.
The 10 prompts
Fill the brackets with the words a buyer uses.
- What are the best [service] companies in [city]?
- Who should I hire for [service] in [city]?
- I need [service] for my [type of business] in [city]. Who do you recommend?
- Which [service] firms in [city] are known for [the thing you do best]?
- What's a high-end [service] company in [city] worth paying for?
- Compare [your business name] and [your strongest competitor].
- What are some alternatives to [your strongest competitor] in [city]?
- What do customers say about [your business name]?
- What does [your business name] do, and where are they located?
- [service] near me
Prompts 1 to 5 and 10 test discovery: does ChatGPT bring you up when nobody names you. Prompts 6 to 9 test knowledge: when someone names you, does it get you right.
Run each prompt once. With five more minutes, run 1 through 5 again in a fresh Temporary Chat. Answers vary between runs.
How to read the results
Score each answer. Four outcomes matter.
Named and linked. Your business appears with a citation or link to your site or a listing. This is the result you want. Click the Sources button, which OpenAI's help article says lists every page used, and note which page earned the mention.
Named, no link. ChatGPT knows you but did not cite a live source on this run. Weaker for "near me" questions.
Competitor named, you absent. The most useful finding. Open Sources and read the pages that got them named: a directory, a review site, a service page with the city in it.
Named with wrong details. Old address, wrong services, a closed location. That is a separate problem with its own fix, covered in our guide to fixing wrong business info in ChatGPT.
Then total it. The cutoffs below are our reading, not an OpenAI benchmark.
- Discovery score (prompts 1 to 5 and 10): count the answers where you were named. 0 or 1 out of 6 means you are invisible for category questions. 2 to 3 means you are in the mix. 4 or more means you are one of the default answers.
- Knowledge score (prompts 6 to 9): count the answers that described you correctly. Anything under 4 out of 4 is a fact problem, and fact problems come first.
What the scores usually point to
Zero on discovery with a perfect knowledge score means nothing ties you to the category and city. The fix is a page for each service in each place you serve.
A low knowledge score means sources disagree about you. The fix is cleanup before anything else.
Named everywhere except prompt 10 means your local listing signals are thin. "Near me" leans on location, so look at your Yelp page and your Google Business Profile first. Our guide on how to list your business on ChatGPT covers those sources.
Write down the date and scores, and rerun monthly. The trend is the measurement.
Our own scorecard, in traffic
We judge our own site by sessions, not screenshots. ChatGPT sent The Williams Agency 163 sessions between August 7 and November 4, 2026, against 155 from Google organic (Google Analytics 4), with $0 spent on ads. In the 28 days to November 8, 2026, AI assistants sent 49 sessions to Google organic's 41.
To see the same number for your site, OpenAI's publishers FAQ says ChatGPT referral links carry utm_source=chatgpt.com. Filter Google Analytics 4 by that source. The prompt test tells you whether you are named. The sessions tell you whether being named is sending people. Our case study on The Williams Agency's own site shows the full build.
What we do for clients
Every GEO partnership starts with this test run at scale: dozens of prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, written around your services and cities, repeated monthly. Then we fix what the results point to. GEO partnerships start at $5,000 a month. See how our generative engine optimization work runs, or the AI search overview.
How do I check if ChatGPT recommends my business?
Open a Temporary Chat so your past conversations and memories are not used, then ask category questions with your city, such as "Who should I hire for [service] in [city]?" Note whether your business is named and whether it is linked. Run 10 varied prompts, score how many name you, and repeat monthly to track the trend.
Is my business on ChatGPT if it shows up when I search my own name?
Not necessarily. Prompts that name you test whether ChatGPT knows you. Buyers who have not heard of you ask category questions like "best [service] in [city]." If you appear only when named, ChatGPT knows you exist but does not connect you to your category, which is where new customers come from. Test both kinds of prompt.
Why does ChatGPT give different answers each time I ask?
ChatGPT writes each answer fresh, and when search runs, the pages it reads can differ between runs. Location matters too: OpenAI's help article says ChatGPT uses general location from your IP address. Run key prompts twice in separate Temporary Chats, include the city in the prompt, and judge by the pattern across runs, not a single answer.
Can I see how many customers ChatGPT sends me?
Yes, for visits to your website. OpenAI's publishers FAQ says ChatGPT referral links include utm_source=chatgpt.com, which Google Analytics records as a traffic source. Phone calls and walk-ins prompted by ChatGPT will not show there, so ask new customers how they found you as well. Our own site logged 163 ChatGPT sessions from August 7 to November 4, 2026.
Talk to us
Run the test, then send us your scores and your website. We will tell you what the pattern means and what we would fix first. Send them through our contact page or call 214-302-7194.