How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business (free and paid ways)

Your customers ask ChatGPT for recommendations, and it names you or a competitor, invisibly. Three ways to find out where you stand, from a free five-minute check to real tracking across every engine.

More of your customers are asking ChatGPT for recommendations than you think, and when it answers, it either says your name or a competitor's. The frustrating part is that this happens invisibly. Nobody emails you to say "ChatGPT sent me to your competitor today." So the first job is simply to find out where you stand. Here are three ways to do it, from free-and-rough to reliable.

Method 1: ask it yourself (free, but treat it with suspicion)

Open ChatGPT and ask the exact question a buyer would ask. Not "tell me about [your company]", that is not how a customer searches. Ask the real thing:

"What's the best [your category] for [a specific situation]?"
"Who should I hire for [the job you do] in [your city]?"
"What are the top [your product] brands for [a specific need]?"

Then look: are you named? Where in the list? Is a competitor named instead?

The catch: one answer is close to a coin flip. Ask the same question twice and you can get two different lists, engines vary their wording and their sources run to run. So a single check tells you almost nothing. If you are named once, do not celebrate; if you are missing once, do not panic. You need the rate, not one roll of the dice. Which leads to method 2.

Method 2: track it by hand in a spreadsheet (free, but tedious)

To get past the coin-flip problem, turn it into a measurement:

Write down 5 to 10 real buying questions your customers ask.
Once a week, ask each one on ChatGPT, and ideally on Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews too, since your buyers do not all use the same tool.
For each answer, note: were you named, in what position, and who else was.
After a month you will have a real picture: "we get named in about 2 of 10 answers, always behind the same two competitors."

That is genuinely useful, and it is free. The downside is honest: it is a chore, it is easy to abandon by week three, and doing it across several engines by hand eats an afternoon. It also does not tell you why, the part that actually lets you fix it.

Method 3: use a tracker (paid, and it answers the "why")

A tool built for this does the weekly asking for you, across every engine at once, and adds the piece the spreadsheet cannot: the sources. When a competitor is named and you are not, it shows you the exact pages the AI read before it decided, which is almost always a third-party review or list post, not the competitor's own site. That turns "we're invisible" into "here is the specific page to get on."

This is what SearchVis does. It asks your buying questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and Grok on a schedule, reports the share of answers that named you, shows who was named instead, and points at the source you are missing from. There is a free tier, so you can see your own number before paying anyone, including us.

Which method is right for you

If you want to...	Use
Get a rough gut-check in five minutes	Method 1 (ask it yourself)
Track it seriously without spending money	Method 2 (spreadsheet)
Know your rate across every engine, and what to fix	Method 3 (a tracker)

The honest bottom line

However you do it, the mistake is not measuring at all. Businesses lose AI recommendations quietly, for months, and only find out when they finally check. Start with the free ask today, and if the answer worries you (or if you can't tell because it keeps changing), move to real tracking. Being invisible in AI answers is fixable, but only once you can see it.

For the bigger picture on how to actually win those mentions, see our plain-English guide to answer engine optimization.