How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business: a step-by-step AI visibility test.

More and more people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini “who would you recommend for…?” before visiting any website. If your business is missing from those answers, you lose customers you never even hear about. Checking how AI sees your business takes about an hour and needs no paid tools. It is the same test I start every GEO project with.

Step 1: write down the questions your customers ask

Do not test your company name. Test situations where the customer does not yet know who to choose. Prepare 10-20 questions in five groups:

1Service and place"Who would you recommend for a bathroom renovation in Gdańsk?"Most important

2Comparisons"Heat pump or gas boiler - which is better for a 150 m² house?"Decision

3Problems"Why did my traffic drop after switching e-commerce platforms?"Need

4Your brand"What do you know about company X? What are its reviews like?"Reputation

The best questions come from customer conversations, enquiry emails and the queries report in Google Search Console. Write them the way people talk, not as keywords: “who can audit SEO for a Shopify store?” rather than “Shopify SEO audit”.

Step 2: ask in clean conditions

AI assistants tailor answers to chat history and account settings. To get a reliable result:

• use a temporary chat or a logged-out session, so memory and past conversations do not affect the answer,
• check several tools: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews, because each uses slightly different sources,
• ask with search enabled where possible, because that is how most people looking for businesses use them,
• repeat each question 2-3 times, because answers vary between attempts,
• for local questions, include the city in the question instead of relying on location.

Step 3: record results in one spreadsheet

Mental notes mean nothing a week later. A simple spreadsheet lets you compare results month to month:

Question	Tool	Result	How the business is described	Cited sources	Who is mentioned
Who would you recommend for X?	ChatGPT	recommends with link	Matches the offer	company site, Google Maps	Competitor A, B
Who would you recommend for X?	Perplexity	mentions	Outdated prices	business directory	Competitor A
Alternatives to competitor A	Gemini	missing	-	industry ranking	Competitor B, C

Record not only whether the business appears, but also how it is described. A wrong specialism, an old address or outdated prices signal that AI is using stale sources.

Step 4: check where AI gets its information

This is the most valuable part of the test. Perplexity, ChatGPT with search and AI Overviews show the sources behind their answers. Go through them and answer three questions:

1. Is your website among the sources? If not, AI may not be able to access it or may not find clear answers on it.
2. Which other sites are cited? Rankings, directories, industry portals and articles are places worth being present on.
3. Where does wrong information come from? If AI repeats old details, find the source and fix it: your Google Business Profile, a directory listing, an old article.

If AI does not see your website at all, check that you are not blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt or in your Cloudflare settings. I explain how in GEO in practice. You can check it in seconds with the AI bot checker.

Step 5: measure AI traffic in Google Analytics 4

The test shows whether AI recommends you. GA4 shows whether anyone acts on it. In the Traffic acquisition report, set the dimension to Session source and add a filter with a regular expression:

chatgpt\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|claude\.ai

You will see how many visits come from each AI tool, which pages they land on and whether they lead to enquiries. Links from ChatGPT often carry a utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter, which makes them easy to spot. Some AI traffic still ends up as “direct”, so treat these numbers as a lower bound.

It is worth creating a separate “AI” channel group in GA4 with the same condition. AI assistant traffic then shows up in reports alongside organic and paid traffic.

Step 6: look at your server or Cloudflare logs

The last step is checking whether AI crawlers visit your site at all. In your server logs or the Cloudflare dashboard (the AI bots section), look for:

• OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User - OpenAI crawlers that fetch pages for ChatGPT search,
• PerplexityBot - Perplexity’s crawler,
• Googlebot and Bingbot - visibility in AI Overviews and Copilot depends on them.

If these crawlers are missing or get errors, no content will help until access is fixed.

What to do with the results

Not in answersAI does not know you or trust the sourcesStart with crawler access, a clear offer on your site, your Google Business Profile and presence in directories and rankings.

Present but described wronglyFix the sourcesUpdate your site, profile and directory listings. AI repeats what it finds online.

The most common first result is “AI lists our competitors but not us”. That does not mean competitors are better. Usually their offer is simply better described and they have more mentions in the places models rely on. That can be changed, and I describe the concrete steps in GEO in practice. If you would rather have me run this test for you, including a competitor analysis, see the GEO service or the SEO audit, which also covers AI visibility.