How to Check If ChatGPT Recommends Your Business 20-Minute Audit
Key Takeaways
- Buyers increasingly ask AI assistants for recommendations directly, so whether ChatGPT names your business is now a measurable marketing question, separate from your Google rankings.
- You can audit it manually in about 20 minutes: write ten prompts a real customer would ask, run them in fresh sessions across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and record two things separately: mentions and citations.
- A mention is your brand named in the answer a citation is your site used as a source. Semrushs study of 126 million prompts found 62% of AI citations never produce a brand mention.
- If you are cited but not mentioned, the usual cause is that no page on your site states plainly what your business is in a sentence a model can quote. If you are absent entirely, the gap is usually off-site: reviews, directories and comparison content.
- Markty AI automates this check: its AI and Local Visibility feature scans ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity four times a month, scores your visibility and benchmarks it against competitors.
A growing share of buying research never touches a search results page. Someone asks ChatGPT for the best tool, the best local service, the best alternative to the market leader, and acts on the answer. That answer either names your business or it does not, and most owners have never checked. Here is how to check in about 20 minutes, with nothing but the AI assistants themselves.
Step 1: Write ten prompts a real customer would ask
Not prompts about you. Prompts about the problem you solve. A useful spread:
Three category prompts: "best [your category] for small businesses", "top [category] tools in 2026", "affordable [category] for a startup"
Three alternative prompts: "[big competitor] alternatives", "cheaper alternative to [competitor]", "[competitor A] vs [competitor B], which should I pick"
Two local or niche prompts, if they fit your business: "[category] for [your niche or city]"
Two direct prompts: "is [your brand] any good", "what does [your brand] do"
Write them down. You will reuse the exact same list every month, and the value of the audit is in the comparison over time.
Step 2: Run them in clean sessions
Open a fresh chat for every prompt, with memory or personalization turned off where the assistant offers it. If you have chatted with these tools about your own business before, your history will contaminate the answers and tell you what the model knows about you, not what it tells a stranger.
Run all ten prompts in ChatGPT, then repeat in Gemini and Perplexity. The engines genuinely differ: ChatGPT tends to cite sources but name fewer brands, Gemini names brands freely but leans on pre-existing familiarity, and Perplexity cites most aggressively. A brand can be visible on one and absent on another, and the fix is different for each.
Step 3: Record mentions and citations separately
For every answer, note two things:
Mention: is your brand named in the answer text?
Citation: is your website linked or referenced as a source?
These are different signals and they fail independently. Semrush's study of 126 million prompts found that 62% of AI citations never produce a brand mention: the model reads a site, uses its facts and names somebody else. If you only track one number, track mentions, because the mention is what puts you on the buyer's shortlist.
Step 4: Read the pattern
Cited but not mentioned. Your content is good enough to be a source, but nothing on the page states what your business is in a sentence worth quoting. The fix is on your own site: add a plain, factual identity sentence to the pages being cited, add FAQ sections whose first sentence answers the question, and build comparison pages. Comparative content produces roughly 2.4 times more brand mentions than informational content, because "which tool should I use" prompts are answered from comparison-shaped sources.
Absent entirely. The engines do not know you exist, and writing more on your own site will not fix Gemini in particular. The gap is off-site: review platforms, directories, third-party listicles and communities. Start with the profiles buyers already trust in your category.
Mentioned, but described wrongly. Check what your own site says. AI engines lift descriptions from your pages, your pricing page and files like llms.txt, so stale copy on your side becomes a stale answer on theirs. Keep pricing, plan names and feature claims current everywhere a crawler can read them.
Step 5: Re-run monthly, same prompts
Fixes take 30 to 60 days to appear, because models need to recrawl and answers refresh on their own schedule. Keep the prompt list identical, keep mentions and citations as separate counts, and expect movement on ChatGPT and Perplexity before Gemini, which responds mostly to brand familiarity built off-site.
Automating the check
The manual audit costs 20 minutes a month and it is worth doing at least once by hand, because reading the actual answers teaches you how the engines talk about your category. If you want it running continuously, Markty AI includes an AI and Local Visibility feature that scans ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity four times a month, scores whether your brand appears for your category, benchmarks it against competitors and recommends the content most likely to close the gaps. It is included in every plan alongside the AI employees that produce and publish the content itself.