Ask ChatGPT to recommend a business like yours. Are you in the answer?

How do I check whether ChatGPT recommends my business?

Ask it the way a customer would, without your business name, and see who it suggests. Then do the same in Gemini and Perplexity. You need three questions, written for your own trade and your own city.

1. Ask for the best, with the kind of customer you want. “Who are the best office fit-out companies in Dubai for small clinics?”

2. Ask for a job to be done, with a size and a deadline. “I need 200 Diwali gift hampers delivered across Ahmedabad by next month. Which supplier should I call?”

3. Ask for a comparison and a reason. “Which physiotherapy clinic in Pune is good for running injuries, and why?”

Swap in your trade, your city and your best customer. Keep the wording plain, the way someone types on a phone.

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity side by side, in a private window or logged out if you can, so your own past chats play no part. Put the city in every question. ChatGPT may otherwise guess your area from your internet connection (OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT), and you want the answer a customer across town would see.

Paste each question into all three. For every answer, write down three things: whether you’re named, who is named instead, and which websites the answer drew on. ChatGPT shows those under a Sources button when the answer used the web, and Gemini does when sources are available (OpenAI Help Center; Gemini Apps Help, View related sources from Gemini Apps). Perplexity puts numbered citations in the answer, each linking to its source (Perplexity Help Center, How does Perplexity work?).

What does it mean if my business isn’t named?

It means the pages the assistant read didn’t point to you. When a question needs current facts, ChatGPT may search the web on its own and answer with links to what it found (OpenAI Help Center), and Perplexity searches in real time for every question (Perplexity Help Center). They recommend from what those pages say.

The sources you wrote down tell you which pages those are.

• If they’re directories, review sites or articles, those are the places the assistants trust for your trade, and you’re absent from them.
• If they’re other businesses’ own websites, those pages say in plain words what they do and where. Yours may not yet.
• If you’re named but the details are wrong, such as an old address, your listings probably disagree with each other or with your site.

Don’t judge from one answer. When SparkToro had 600 volunteers run the same 12 questions through ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI 2,961 times, they found less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google’s AI would give the same list of brands twice in 100 tries (SparkToro, 27 Jan 2026). Ask each question three or four more times, on different days, and count how often you appear. If it’s rarely or never, that’s your answer.

Why does this matter now?

Because the number of people asking assistants for things is now counted in billions, and many of those who still search read an AI summary before any link.

• OpenAI says ChatGPT reaches 1.2 billion weekly users (OpenAI, DevDay 2026 recap, 29 Sep 2026).
• Google says its Gemini app has 950 million monthly users, and AI Mode, the AI answer view in Google Search, has passed 1 billion (Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks, 22 Jul 2026).
• Researchers from OpenAI, Duke and Harvard sorted ChatGPT messages by purpose. Looking things up, including people, products and recipes, rose from 14% of messages in July 2024 to 24% a year later. The authors call it “a very close substitute for web search” (Chatterji et al., How People Use ChatGPT, NBER working paper 34255, Sep 2025).
• In a Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 US adults in February 2026, about four in ten said they use chatbots to search for information, and six in ten said they read the AI summaries at the top of search results (Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026, 17 Jun 2026).

That last part matters for anyone who relies on search. Pew tracked the Google searches of 900 US adults in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked an ordinary result on 8% of visits, against 15% when there was none, and they clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% (Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025).

Pew’s figures are for the United States. We haven’t found survey figures of the same quality for the UAE or India, so read them as a direction, with the global user counts above as the scale.

We think this is where many customers now make their shortlist. A firm with years of good work can still be left out of it, because an assistant can only recommend what it can read about you.