How to check what AI says about your business — free, in 10 minutes

Almost half of Google searches now end in an AI-written answer, and buyers increasingly skip the list of links entirely: they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini who to hire and take the recommendation. Which means there is a version of your business living inside these engines right now — described in words you never wrote, ranked against competitors you may not know about. Most owners have never once looked at it. Here is how to look, for free, in about ten minutes.

Step 1 — ask all five engines, not one

The single most common mistake is checking ChatGPT and stopping. Each engine has different training data, a different search index, and different citation habits, so the same business can be recommended first on one engine and completely absent from another. The five that matter for US customers: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews (the AI box above normal results), Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. All five have free tiers — this costs nothing but minutes.

Step 2 — run these prompts

Ask each engine the questions a real customer would ask. Adapt these to your trade and city:

1. "Best [your service] in [your city]"
2. "[your service] near [neighborhood] that takes [insurance / walk-ins / weekend appointments]"
3. "Is [your business name] good? What do people say about them?"
4. "[your business name] vs [your main competitor]"
5. "Who should I hire for [the problem you solve]?"
6. If you serve Spanish-speaking customers, repeat the first two in Spanish — the answers are often completely different.

Step 3 — grade what comes back

For every answer, note which of four buckets you land in: Recommended (named as a pick), Mentioned (in the list, below others), Hedged ("I don't have detailed information about…"), or Absent (a competitor is recommended and you never appear). Two more things worth writing down: which competitors keep appearing, and whether anything the AI says about you is wrong — old prices, old address, services you no longer offer. Engines repeat their sources, so a wrong claim tends to keep resurfacing until the source is fixed.

Why the engines disagree about you

If you score well on one engine and poorly on another, that is normal — and diagnostic. Perplexity leans heavily on recent web sources and citations; ChatGPT blends training data with live search; Google's AI Overviews draw on its index and your Business Profile; Claude and Gemini each weight sources their own way. Disagreement usually points at the real problem: the engines that read structured, machine-readable facts about you can describe you; the ones that can't find those facts fall back on hedging — or on your competitor, who published theirs.

What to do with the results

If you came back Recommended across the board — congratulations, defend it. For everyone else, the fixes are concrete: publish structured data (schema markup) so engines get verified facts; add an llms.txt file and machine-readable pricing; make sure AI crawlers aren't blocked in your robots.txt; answer real customer questions in plain text on your pages; and build the third-party footprint (reviews, directories) engines love to cite. Research from Princeton presented at KDD 2024 found that methods like citing sources, adding statistics, and quotable phrasing measurably increase AI citation rates — this is an optimizable channel, not a lottery.

How often should I check what AI says about my business?

Monthly is a good rhythm for most small businesses. AI answers shift as engines update their sources and your competitors publish new content. If AI referrals matter to you commercially, continuous monitoring with alerts replaces the manual check.

Is checking ChatGPT alone enough?

No. Each engine has different training data, search indexes, and citation habits, so the same business can rank first on Perplexity and be absent from ChatGPT. A real check covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.

Why does AI recommend my competitor instead of me?

Usually because the engine can confidently describe your competitor and cannot confidently describe you. Structured data, plain-text services and pricing, an accessible robots.txt, and a strong review footprint give engines verifiable facts — businesses that publish them are safer to recommend.

Can I pay to appear in AI answers?

No. There is currently no ad placement inside organic AI recommendations on these engines. Visibility is earned through machine-readable content, authoritative mentions, and accurate third-party sources — which also means early movers keep an advantage.