Local AI search · Original data
Is my business on ChatGPT
You can find out in about three minutes, and you do not need a tool or an account to do it.
Open ChatGPT and type the question your customer would type. Not your business name, because searching for yourself always finds you. The question that matters sounds like "best bakery in Coral Gables" or "who does the best detailing near Brickell". Whatever a stranger with a problem would ask.
Read the answer and look for two things. Whether you are in it, and who is there instead.
Then ask it once more in a different shape. Change "best" to "top rated", or add your neighbourhood, or ask where to go rather than who is best. This matters more than it looks. When we re-ran the same ten businesses after two days, the results moved by up to two places out of ten, with the same businesses in the sample. One answer tells you very little. Six or eight tell you something real.
The next step is the one most people skip. Under most answers ChatGPT shows the pages it used. Open that list. Those pages are the only thing standing between you and being named, because the model built its answer out of them. If you see your city magazine, a review platform and two food guides, those are your targets. If you see a competitor's own website in there, that is worth knowing too.
What the result means depends on which of three things you find.
If you are named in most answers, you are in good shape and the job is keeping it that way as the sources change.
If you appear sometimes, you are on the edge. Usually that means one or two sources carry you and the rest do not know you exist.
If you never appear, your name is missing from the pages the model reads. Nobody penalised you. Your name is just missing from the handful of pages the model reads, and that is a list you can work your way onto.
One more check, because it costs nothing. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for OAI-SearchBot. If there is a Disallow line under it, you have told the robot that collects pages for ChatGPT to stay away. Deleting that line is a one minute job for whoever runs your site, and it has to happen before any of the rest is worth doing.