Is ChatGPT Recommending Your Business? How to Check AI Visibility in 2026

Type "best plumber near me" into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude and you get a short, confident list of names — usually three to five. If your business isn't one of them, you didn't lose a ranking position the way you would on Google. You simply never existed for that customer.

This is a different failure mode than classic SEO, and it needs a different check. Being #1 on Google Maps says nothing about whether an assistant's live web-search tool call surfaces you. The two systems read different signals, weight them differently, and — critically — an assistant's answer changes between runs, so a single check is not enough to trust either way.

How to actually check it

Ask each assistant the same three or four questions a real customer would use: "who is the best <category> in <city>", "top rated <category> near <city>", and a same-day/urgency variant if that applies to your business. Do this on all four major assistants, not just one — they draw on different underlying search and citation systems and disagree with each other more often than you'd expect.

What you're looking for isn't just "was I named" but the pattern: were you named on some questions and not others? Which competitors keep coming up instead? What sources do the assistants cite when they answer? That last one usually points straight at the fix — a listing, a review site, or a page on your own site the assistant can't parse.

We built a free 30-second check that runs this exact process against real assistants and shows you the actual verbatim answer, not a synthetic score. If you want to see how a whole city's worth of a given industry is doing, the AI Visibility Index has real, dated measurements broken out by industry and city.