How do I check if AI recommends my business?

Rule one: never search your own brand name

Asking ChatGPT "what is Acme Plumbing" tests whether it can read your website. It cannot tell you anything about whether you win a customer, because customers who already know your name are not the customers AI decides.

The questions that matter are unbranded: best, cheapest, near me, open now, "who should I use for", and problem-first questions like "my furnace is making a clicking noise who do I call in Denver".

Rule two: test every engine, not just ChatGPT

The engines routinely disagree. Different training data, different retrieval sources, different recency. A business named confidently in ChatGPT can be entirely absent from Gemini, which sits inside the search product most of its prospects use.

• •ChatGPT - the largest standalone assistant
• •Google AI - AI Overviews above the results most buyers still start with
• •Gemini - Google assistant surfaces across Android and Workspace
• •Claude - heavily used for research and comparison
• •Meta AI - inside the apps most consumers already have open
• •Grok - fast-growing, with different source weighting
• •DeepSeek - increasingly common and often overlooked entirely

Rule three: record the words, not just a verdict

The verbatim answer is where the diagnosis lives. It tells you which competitor was named instead of you, what attribute the engine used to justify the pick, and whether it stated something factually wrong about you.

Keep the text. A score without the text cannot tell you what to change.

Doing it manually versus running an audit

You can do this by hand. Open each engine, ask ten questions, log the answers in a spreadsheet. It is genuinely useful and it costs nothing but time - expect a few hours for a meaningful sample, and expect it to be hard to repeat consistently.

A MyFast AI audit does the same thing at scale: 100 generated buyer questions across all seven engines, 700 recorded answers, a Findability Score, share of voice against the competitors you name, and a plain-English fix plan. The point of the tool is repeatability, not magic.