Is Your Brand Showing Up in ChatGPT? How to Check in 5 Minutes

Watch a teenager look something up today and there's a good chance they won't open Google. Which phone to buy, which coaching centre is good, they just ask ChatGPT. Most of the parents I speak to have started doing the same, usually without noticing they've switched.

That changes something important for every business owner reading this. When someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation, it doesn't give them ten blue links to browse. It gives them three or four names, written up nicely, with a line or two on each. If you're not one of those names, you weren't skipped on page two. You were never in the room.

The annoying part is that most businesses have no idea whether they're being recommended or not. So before you spend a rupee on anything "AI", spend five minutes finding out where you stand.

The test itself

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity side by side. The free versions are fine.

Now, and this is the bit people get wrong, don't type your own name. Of course it'll find you if you type your name. Type the question your customer would type. If you run a B-school, that's something like "good MBA colleges in Hyderabad with decent placements". A physio clinic would try "reliable physiotherapy centre in Gurgaon for back pain". A software company, "HR software for a 50-person company that isn't too expensive".

Ask it three or four different ways. Throw in your area, a budget, a worry. Real people are vague and specific at the same time, so be like that.

Then just read what comes back. Are you there? Who's there instead? And if you are mentioned, is what it says about you even true?

One tip on Perplexity: it lists the websites it pulled from. Click through a few. That list is basically a map of who the AI trusts in your industry, and it's often not who you'd expect.

What you'll probably find

Usually, nothing. Your business doesn't come up at all. That's normal, and it's fixable. It tends to mean your own website doesn't answer questions in a straightforward way, or there isn't much written about you anywhere else, or both.

Sometimes it's worse than nothing. The AI mentions you, but with your old fees, a course you dropped two years ago, or the address you moved out of. That information is coming from somewhere, an old directory listing or a forgotten page, and it needs cleaning up.

And quite often, the same competitor appears every single time. Go and look at what they've done. I can almost guarantee they have proper FAQ pages, a pile of reviews on sites other than their own, and they turn up in "top 10" articles and forum threads. None of that is magic. It's just effort they made and you haven't yet.

Why AI picks the brands it picks

These tools aren't forming opinions. They're stitching together an answer from everything that's been written about you online. If your website clearly answers the questions people ask, if other sites mention you, and if the same facts about you show up again and again, the AI feels safe repeating them. If the information is thin or contradictory, it plays safe and names someone else.

People in my industry have started calling this AEO and GEO (answer engine and generative engine optimisation). Ignore the acronyms if you like. The idea is simple: you're no longer just trying to rank a page, you're trying to become the answer.

If you want to start this week

Write down the three questions customers ask you most. The ones you're tired of answering on the phone. Make sure each one has a clear, plain answer on your website, under a heading that is more or less the question itself. Ask five happy customers for a Google review. Then repeat the test in a month and see if anything has moved.

If it hasn't, that's when it's worth getting someone in. I'd just rather you know where you stand first, because the businesses that sort this out now are going to be the default names AI gives people for a long time.