How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my business?

Last updated 30 October 2026. Written by Oyekola Obajuwon, founder of Growveloper, a growth studio that builds the website, the marketing and the follow up for owner run businesses in the United States, the United Kingdom and Nigeria.

Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, without your business name in them. Use ten questions, run each one three times in a private window, and write down who gets named. Then add a tool that counts citations over time. One answer proves nothing, because AI tools rarely give the same list twice.

Can I just ask ChatGPT about my business?

You can, but it tests the wrong thing. Typing what do you know about Ade's Plumbing tells you whether the model has heard of you. Your customer never types your name. They type who fixes boilers near me or best accountant for a small business in Leeds, and the question is whether your name comes back.

Asking ChatGPT what it knows about your business is the one test no customer will ever run. It is still worth doing once, to catch a wrong address or an old service list, but it is a spelling check, not a visibility check.

How do I check whether ChatGPT recommends my business?

Write ten questions the way a customer would, and keep your name out of every one. Mix three kinds:

Questions a buyer asks with a place in them

For example, best wedding photographers in Lekki or plumber in Croydon who answers at weekends. The place matters, because these tools recommend by location.

Questions about the problem, not the service

For example, my website gets visitors but nobody calls, what should I do. The owner with the problem does not yet know they want you.

Questions that compare

For example, is it better to hire a bookkeeper or use software. Comparisons are where tools name names.

Open a private or logged-out window, so your own chat history does not tilt the answer towards you. Ask each question three times, in a fresh chat each time. For every answer, write one line: named or not, linked or not, and who was named instead. Ten questions, three runs, 30 lines. That is my working number, not a study; it is what one person can keep doing every month.

Why does ChatGPT give a different answer every time?

Because it does not look up a fixed list. It writes a new answer each time, and the names in it shift. SparkToro, an audience research company, tested this with Gumshoe.ai. As Search Engine Journal reported in January 2026, they ran 2,961 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI answers, 12 prompts each run 60 to 100 times per platform. The chance of getting the same list of brands twice was less than 1 in 100. The same list in the same order came up less than 0.1% of the time.

Rand Fishkin, SparkToro's co-founder, summed it up: "If you ask an AI tool for brand/product recommendations a hundred times nearly every response will be unique." The researchers found the share of answers a brand appears in held steadier than its position in the list. So count how often you appear, never where.

Which tools show my AI mentions for me?

Two Microsoft reports count citations, and one Clarity feature runs your own prompts. Only one of them touches ChatGPT.

Bing's AI Performance report "shows how publisher content appears across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations". Useful, but it is Microsoft's assistant, not OpenAI's. Clarity's Citations dashboard, generally available since 13 May 2026, counts how often your pages are cited and which searches the AI used to find them. You connect Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console to prove the site is yours.

Clarity's Topic insights is the closest these tools get to ChatGPT. You write the prompts, and it reports who gets cited. Microsoft's own note on it: "We are using GPT-5.3 with an allowance of 10 reports per week per project". It is in beta, and it is a model answering your prompts, not a record of what real customers saw. I set mine up the way I describe in how to get your website cited by ChatGPT.

What did the check show for my own business?

Nothing, at first, and that is the useful part. On 9 and 10 September 2026, Clarity's Topic insights ran 62 prompts about the work I do through ChatGPT. Growveloper was cited zero times. Directories, tool vendors and pages that answered the question in their first line were cited instead.

On 24 September I ran ten of those questions by hand in Google's AI Mode and Perplexity, from Lagos. Zero of 18 answers cited us. ChatGPT's web view would not load an answer that day, which is its own lesson about checking by hand.

There was one hit. A Google AI Overview quoted my post on the three vendor tax, the cost of running a business with three separate agencies, when the search was that phrase. Nobody else writes about it under that name, so the answer had one source to use. And a search that had shown us earlier the same day came back without us on the second try. I watched the answers shift on my own name.

What does it mean if ChatGPT never mentions my business?

That you are a normal small business, and that the answer is being built from other people's pages. In our own checks the names that kept coming back were tool vendors writing about their own category, directories, forum threads and specialist blogs with numbers of their own. A business gets named when it owns something specific: a phrase, a place, a number nobody else has.

The work that moves it is ordinary. Answer the exact question on your own site in the first lines, be listed where the directories and maps already look, and get talked about on sites you do not own. I go through it step by step in what answer engine optimisation means for a small business and, for the basics, how to get people to find your business online.

How often should I check?

Once a month, with the same ten questions, so this month can be compared with last. Put the count in the same place as your other numbers; it belongs in the monthly marketing report next to enquiries and calls. If it climbs from zero of 30 to four of 30, something is working.

If you want the check set up and the pages that move it built, that is part of the growth marketing work I do. The offer is a free 30-minute call, no pitch, and 20% off if we build, booked at cal.com/growveloper/30.

Ask ten times, write it down, and ask again next month. The tally is the answer.