How to check if ChatGPT mentions your business

Can't I just ask ChatGPT directly?

You can, and it's the first thing everyone tries. The trouble is what the answer actually tells you. Ask "have you heard of Acme Bookkeeping?" and ChatGPT answers from its training memory. A confident yes might be built on a three-year-old snapshot of your site. A no only means you weren't prominent in its training data — which is true of almost every small business on earth, including plenty of thriving ones.

The direct question also isn't the one your buyers ask. Nobody who doesn't already know you asks about you by name. They ask category questions: "best bookkeeping service for UK contractors", "who can audit our cookie banner", "invoicing tool that does CIS deductions". Whether you're named in those answers is what moves revenue. Whether ChatGPT can recite your About page is trivia.

What's the manual check that actually works?

You need the same discipline you'd apply to rank tracking: fixed questions, clean sessions, several engines, written-down results.

1. Write six buyer questions for your category. Phrase them the way a stranger with a budget would, not the way you describe yourself. Include your location if you sell locally.
2. Use a clean session. Log out or use a temporary chat, and turn memory off. If you've ever discussed your business in that account, the engine will flatter you with it.
3. Make sure web search is on. For current, commercial questions the engines answer from live retrieval, not memory. An answer without sources is the model reminiscing; an answer with sources is the one your buyer sees.
4. Ask the same six questions in at least three engines. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews is a reasonable panel; add Bing Copilot if you have the patience.
5. Record three things per answer: were you named, was your site cited as a source, and were you actually recommended?
6. Repeat the identical set monthly. One run is a snapshot. The trend is the signal.

What counts as a "mention"?

Three different things get lumped together as "ChatGPT mentions us", and they're worth splitting because they're earned differently:

Most businesses that "appear in ChatGPT" are named in passing inside a list scraped from someone else's roundup article. Recommended is the level to aim at, and it's the hardest to fake.

Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my business?

Because for anything current, answer engines don't consult their memory — they search the live web, read a handful of sources, and compose an answer from what those sources say. Comparison articles, directories, review platforms, industry roundups, and — if you're lucky — your own pages.

If none of the sources an engine reads name you, you don't exist for that engine — no matter how good your product or your Google rankings.

That's bad news and good news. Bad, because it means an invisible brand stays invisible across every engine at once — they all drink from the same well. Good, because it's fixable: it isn't a verdict about your business, just an inventory of today's evidence. Change the evidence and the answers follow.

How do you get mentioned?

The full diagnostic is its own guide — why ChatGPT doesn't mention your brand — but the short version is three levers, in order of leverage:

• Answer the buyer questions on your own site. A page that directly answers "who does X for Y in the UK" — with your name in the answer — gives engines a quotable source. Vague brochure copy gives them nothing to quote.
• Get onto the lists the engines already cite. Run the manual check and note which sources keep appearing for your category. Those directories, review sites and roundups are your PR target list.
• Let the machines in. If your robots.txt blocks the AI crawlers, or your pages render only after a wall of JavaScript, you've opted out of the conversation. Our free AI crawler access scanner shows what the bots can actually see.

How often should you re-check?

Monthly, with the same question set. AI answers drift as the underlying sources change — a competitor lands one good roundup placement and your shortlist spot quietly disappears. If running six questions through three engines every month sounds like a chore, that's exactly what our free AI visibility audit automates: it generates the buyer questions, pulls the live evidence, and scores you 0–100. You get the trend without the spreadsheet.