The fastest way to find out what ChatGPT says about your business is to open a fresh chat and ask it the exact questions a customer would ask: "best [service] near [city]" and "what can you tell me about [business name]?" Read the answer closely for three things: does it mention you, does it get your details right, and who does it recommend instead. You can run this whole check in about five minutes, and in our experience running it for contractor clients, that short window is usually enough to know if you have a visibility problem, an accuracy problem, or both.
This is not a technical SEO audit. It is closer to eavesdropping on a conversation your next customer is already having with a robot. Here is exactly how to run it, what to look for, and what the answers actually mean for your business.
Why Checking ChatGPT Matters for Your Business
Homeowners used to Google "plumber near me" and scroll a list. Now a growing number of them just ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity the same question in plain English and take the first two or three answers at face value. OpenAI has described ChatGPT's search behavior as pulling from live web sources when a question calls for current, local information (OpenAI, 2025), and Google has built AI Overviews directly into search results for the same reason: people want a direct answer, not ten blue links (Google Search Central, 2025). Consumer research is starting to back this up too. Pew Research Center found a rising share of U.S. adults now turn to AI chatbots for everyday questions, including local recommendations, rather than a traditional search bar (Pew Research Center, 2025).
That matters for you because these tools do not know your business by reputation the way a neighbor does. They know you by what is written about you online, and only if that information is clear, consistent, and easy to find. If your website, your Google Business Profile, and your reviews tell three slightly different stories, the AI has to guess. Sometimes it guesses in your favor. Sometimes it recommends the competitor down the street who has a cleaner footprint, even if your work is better.
Running this audit is not about vanity. It is about finding out, in five minutes, whether you are losing calls to a gap you did not know existed. If you want the deeper mechanics of why this is happening across search generally, our piece on how generative engines choose which businesses to recommend walks through the ranking signals behind it.
What to Test in the 5-Minute Audit
Keep the audit to five things. Anything more and you will spend an hour chasing details that do not move the needle.
- Presence. Does ChatGPT mention your business at all when asked a relevant question?
- Accuracy. Does it get your services, city, hours, or phone number right?
- Positioning. Does it lead with your business, mention you as an afterthought, or skip you entirely?
- Competitors. Who shows up instead of you, or next to you?
- Consistency. Do you get a different answer if you ask the same thing two different ways?
Each of those maps to a real business risk. Presence is a visibility problem. Accuracy is a content problem. Positioning and competitors are a ranking problem. Consistency tells you whether the AI actually has a confident picture of you or is stitching one together from thin information.
Step-by-Step Audit Workflow
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Open a fresh chat or a private browser window. This matters more than people think. A logged-in, personalized chat can lean on your own search history, which skews the answer. A clean session gets you closer to what a stranger would see.
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Ask a direct question first. Type "What can you tell me about [your business name]?" and read the whole answer before you touch anything else.
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Ask a customer-intent question next. Something like "best roofer in [your city]" or "recommend an HVAC company near [your city]." This is the question that actually drives calls, so it deserves its own separate test.
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Ask a comparison question if you know your top competitor. "How does [your business] compare to [competitor]?" This one is optional, but it is often the most revealing.
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Copy the exact answer into a notes doc. Not a summary of the answer, the actual wording. You want a record you can compare next month, not a memory of how it felt.
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Repeat the same three prompts in Gemini and Perplexity. Five extra minutes here tells you whether this is a ChatGPT-specific gap or something bigger.
Prompts to Copy and Paste for Your Audit
Use these as written, swapping in your business name, service, and city:
- "What can you tell me about [business name]?"
- "What does [business name] do, and where are they located?"
- "Best [your service] in [your city]."
- "Recommend a [your service] company near [your city]."
- "[Your business name] vs [main competitor]."
- "Is [business name] a good choice for [specific service]?"
Run each one in a fresh chat. Do not chain them together in the same conversation, or later prompts will lean on the context of earlier ones and you will not get a clean read.
What to Look for in ChatGPT's Answers
This is where the five-minute test earns its keep. Score each prompt against the same five categories from earlier, and be honest about what you see, not what you hoped to see. Use this scorecard while you work through your results. Green means solid, yellow means worth watching, red means fix it now.
| Category | Green | Yellow | Red |
|---|---|---|---|
| Presence | Mentioned clearly, by name | Mentioned only when prompted directly | Never mentioned at all |
| Accuracy | Services, location, and hours all correct | Minor detail wrong or outdated | Wrong city, wrong services, or contact info |
| Positioning | Named first or in the top few | Named further down the list | Named only after several competitors, or not named |
| Competitors | You appear alongside or ahead of rivals | Competitors dominate, you are an afterthought | Competitors named, you are absent entirely |
| Consistency | Same accurate story across rephrased prompts | Some variation, core facts hold | Contradicts itself between prompts |
Fill this in for ChatGPT, then again for Gemini and Perplexity, and you will have a one-page picture of where your business stands across the tools people are actually using. For a deeper walkthrough of what "good" looks like on each row, revisit the AI visibility guide in our companion post above.
Common Red Flags and What They Mean
"I don't have information on that business." This is not the worst answer, it is just an honest one. It means you have a visibility gap, not a reputation problem. The fix is content and consistency, not damage control.
Wrong hours, wrong address, or wrong services. This usually traces back to conflicting information across your website, your Google Business Profile, and directory listings. The AI is not lying, it is reporting what it found, and what it found is inconsistent.
Competitors named, you are not. This is the one that should get your attention fastest. It means the model has a confident answer, it is just not yours. We ran this exact audit for a roofing client in the Charlotte area: ChatGPT named two competitors by name in the "best roofer near me" prompt and never mentioned our client once, even though their Google reviews were stronger. In our experience, this shows up most often for businesses with a thin or outdated web presence sitting next to a competitor who has invested in clear, structured, up-to-date content. Once we tightened that client's service pages and business profile listings, a follow-up audit a few weeks later had them named in the same prompt.
Different answers to nearly identical questions. This tells you the model does not have a strong, singular picture of your business. It is filling gaps with whatever it finds each time you ask, which means small wording changes in a customer's real-world question could send them somewhere else.
How This Differs for Local Service Businesses (Contractors, Plumbers, HVAC, etc.)
For a national brand, "what does ChatGPT say about us" is mostly a reputation and awareness question. For a roofer, plumber, or HVAC contractor, it is a lead question. Homeowners searching for these services are usually motivated by something broken, urgent, or overdue, and they want a name fast.
That means the prompts that matter most for local service businesses are local and comparison-based: "best HVAC company in [city]," "who fixes roof leaks near me," "[your business] vs [the guy who does the radio ads]." A national retailer might tolerate being mentioned third. A local contractor competing for same-week jobs cannot, because the customer asking that question is often about to call whoever gets named first. Search Engine Land has tracked this shift toward answer-first, comparison-style queries as AI search tools have grown their share of local intent traffic (Search Engine Land, 2025).
This is also where consistency across your Google Business Profile, your website service pages, and your reviews matters more than almost anything else. AI tools are drawing from the same public information a homeowner would find if they searched manually, so if that information is scattered or outdated, the AI's answer will be too. This matters more for trades than for most other industries, because the customer asking the question is often about to call whoever gets named first.
Fixing What You Find: Next Steps After the Audit
Once you have your scorecard filled in, the fix depends on what came up red.
If presence is red, you need more structured, specific content about your business online: clear service pages, an accurate Google Business Profile, and consistent business details across the directories that AI tools and search engines actually pull from.
If accuracy is red, start by fixing the discrepancy at the source, usually your Google Business Profile or your website, since that is often the fastest way to correct what shows up downstream.
If positioning or competitors are red, that is a signal you are being outcompeted in the content and structure that AI systems favor, not necessarily in the quality of your work. That gap is fixable, but it takes a deliberate content and visibility strategy, not a one-time tweak. Fixing those inconsistencies is a good next stop if that is your red flag.
Re-run this same five-minute audit monthly. AI answers shift as these tools update their models and re-crawl the web, and a business that shows up correctly today can slide out of the picture in a few weeks without anyone touching a thing.
Ryan McNally is the founder of AID Marketing Agency, where he builds AI-driven marketing systems for contractors and local service businesses. Read more about Ryan.
