Most business owners have never asked an AI model about their own company. It takes about ten minutes, costs nothing, and it is usually the most uncomfortable ten minutes of the quarter.
Step one: ask the question your buyer asks
Not “tell me about [your company].” That is a vanity question, and the model will find you because you handed it your name. Your buyer does not know your name yet. That is the whole problem.
Ask what they would ask. “Who’s the best commercial plumber in Dallas.” “Best accounting firm for restaurants.” “Who should I use for X near me.” Type it the way a person types it, badly punctuated and all.
Step two: ask it in more than one place
The models disagree with each other, and that disagreement is the useful part. Run the same question through at least ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overview, Gemini and Perplexity. Perplexity is worth including because it shows its sources on screen, which tells you where the answer came from without any guessing.
Use a logged-out or private window. Otherwise you are reading an answer shaped by your own history, which is a version of the answer that only you get.
Step three: write down four things
- Who got named. Note the order. First position gets most of the attention, the same way it always has.
- Whether you appeared at all, and if so, at what point in the answer.
- What got cited underneath. Directories, review sites, Reddit threads, a competitor’s blog post. These are the pages deciding the answer.
- How your business gets described when it does come up. Wrong service list, wrong city and out-of-date claims are extremely common, and they are worse than absence.
Being described wrongly is worse than not being mentioned. One is a gap. The other is misinformation with your name on it.
Step four: ask the follow-up nobody asks
Once you have an answer, ask the model directly: “why did you recommend those?” It will tell you. Usually it points at review counts, a directory listing, a comparison article, or a discussion thread.
That answer is your to-do list. It is the model showing you which handful of pages are currently deciding your category, and almost none of them will be your own website.
What to do with what you find
Three outcomes, roughly. If you were named first, keep the sources it cited healthy and check again next quarter. If you were named late or inconsistently, you exist but you are not the default, which is usually a coverage problem on the sites it trusts rather than a problem with your own pages.
If you did not appear at all, that is not a small gap. Models get more certain over time, not less, and the answer settles harder around whoever is present today. The mechanics behind that are in why ChatGPT doesn’t recommend your business.
Do this yourself first. It costs nothing, and you should never take an agency’s word for where you stand when you can go and ask the thing directly.