How to Check if ChatGPT Recommends Your Business (Manual Method + Free Tool)

More and more people skip Google's ten blue links and simply ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews: "What's the best CRM for a small team?" or "Which dentist in Dubai should I choose?". If your business is not in that answer, you are invisible for that customer, and no analytics tool will tell you.

Here is how to check where you stand, first by hand and then automatically.

1. Write down the questions your customers really ask

Don't test your brand name. Test the questions a new customer types before they know you:

• "best [your category] for [audience]"
• "[your category] in [city]"
• "alternatives to [your biggest competitor]"
• "how much does [your service] cost in [city]?"

Five to ten questions are enough to start.

2. Ask them in a clean session

Open ChatGPT in a private/incognito window (or with memory turned off), so earlier chats don't influence the answer. Ask each question exactly as a customer would. Repeat the same for Perplexity and for Google (AI Overviews / AI Mode).

For every answer, note three things:

1. Are you mentioned? And are you actually recommended, or just listed?
2. Which competitors appear instead?
3. Which sources are cited? Perplexity and Google show links. These pages are where AI gets its information about your market.

3. Repeat it, because answers change

AI answers are not stable. The same question can give a different list tomorrow. One snapshot proves little; you need the same questions, asked the same way, over several weeks to see a trend.

4. Act on the sources, not just your own site

The cited sources are the most useful part. If ChatGPT and Perplexity keep citing the same three "best X" articles and a review site, getting your business onto those pages often does more than rewriting your homepage. Also make sure AI crawlers (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot) are not blocked in your robots.txt.

Doing it automatically

Checking 10 questions on 4 AI engines every week by hand is 40+ answers to read and compare. I built YourAIRank to do exactly this: you enter your website and your customers' questions, and it runs them on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, then shows where you are mentioned or recommended, which competitors appear instead and which sources the answers cite. The first check is free, no signup needed. (For transparency: the ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude checks use their APIs with live web search, so results can differ from their consumer apps. Google AI results are collected through a SERP data provider.)

If you only want to check the technical basics first, the free AI Readiness Checker shows whether AI crawlers can access and understand your site.

What do you see when you ask AI about your own business? I'm curious which engine treats small brands the best.