Your customers have a new first step. Before they Google "best dentist near me" or "accountant in Dubai," a growing share of them ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini the same question — and the AI hands back one or two names, not ten blue links.
If your business isn't one of those names, you're invisible at the exact moment a buying decision is forming. Here's how to find out where you stand.
How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business
It takes about five minutes. Open ChatGPT (and ideally Perplexity and Gemini too) and ask, as a customer would:
- "Recommend a [your category] in [your city]." — e.g. "Recommend a pediatric dentist in Abu Dhabi."
- "Who are the best [category] near [area]?"
- "I need [the specific service you sell]. Who should I call?"
Then read the answers against five questions:
- Presence — do you appear at all?
- Accuracy — is what it says about you correct?
- Position — are you first, or buried under competitors?
- Completeness — does it know your services, location, and hours?
- Consistency — do all three assistants tell the same story?
If you're missing, wrong, or last, that's revenue walking to a competitor who the AI happens to know better.
Why AI leaves good businesses out
AI assistants don't recommend the best business — they recommend the most legible one. They build answers from what they were trained on and can retrieve: your website's content and structure, your reviews, third-party mentions, directory listings, and comparison pages. A business with a strong offline reputation but a thin, unstructured, or missing website simply isn't visible to the model. Word-of-mouth doesn't travel into a language model.
The fix, in plain terms
Getting recommended by AI — Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — comes down to making your business easy for a model to understand and trust:
- Answer-ready content. Clear, factual pages that directly answer the questions customers ask, in extractable prose.
- Structured data (schema). Machine-readable markup that states who you are, what you offer, where, and for how much.
- Entity consistency. The same name, address, services, and category everywhere — your site, Google Business, directories, reviews.
- Reviews and mentions. The community signals models lean on.
Want the five-minute version done for you?
A free AI Visibility Audit runs these checks systematically across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google, scores you on six dimensions, and hands you the top three fixes. No card, no strings — just your score and where you're losing ground.