You can find out in about ten minutes, for free: open ChatGPT and ask it the same questions your customers ask. Ask it to recommend businesses like yours in your area. Ask about your business by name. Then repeat the exercise in Claude and Gemini. What comes back is an honest (sometimes uncomfortably honest) picture of how AI sees you.

This matters because AI assistants have quietly become a referral channel. When someone asks "best electrician near Yeovil" and gets three names in a paragraph, that paragraph is doing the job the first page of Google used to do. We covered the background in our plain-English guide to GEO. This post is the practical part: exactly what to type, how to read the results, and what to fix if you don't like them.

The exact prompts to type

Use these as written, swapping in your own trade, town and business name. Type each one into a fresh chat.

Discovery prompts: do you come up at all?

• "Best [trade] near [town]", for example "best plumber near Bridgwater"
• "Recommend a [service] in [town] for [job]", for example "recommend an accountant in Taunton for a small limited company"
• "I need a [trade] in [town]. Who should I call, and why?"
• "Compare the top [trade] firms in [town]"

Reputation prompts: what does AI say about you by name?

• "What do you know about [business name] in [town]?"
• "Should I hire [business name]? What are their strengths and weaknesses?"
• "Is [business name] reputable?"
• "[Business name] vs [main competitor]: which would you choose for [job]?"

That last one stings a little. Ask it anyway. It's the question your customers are asking.

How to run the prompts properly

• Use a fresh chat for each prompt. Earlier messages colour later answers, so start clean every time.
• Run each prompt two or three times. Answers vary between runs. You're looking for the pattern, not a one-off.
• Check more than one tool. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini at minimum. Add Microsoft Copilot if your customers skew towards it, and try the same questions in Google's AI results too.
• Toggle web search where the tool allows it. With search on, you're testing your live web presence. With it off, you're testing the model's built-in knowledge. Both matter, and they often disagree.

How to interpret what comes back

Every answer lands in one of four buckets:

1. Recommended, accurately. You're named, the description is right, and the tone is positive. Note which sources the tool cites; those are the assets to keep fed and current.
2. Mentioned, but wrong. An old address, services you no longer offer, or your firm muddled with a similarly named one. Almost always traceable to a stale or conflicting source somewhere on the web.
3. Omitted entirely. The most common result for small businesses, and the least personal. It's rarely a verdict on your work. It usually means the AI couldn't find enough clear, corroborated information to name you with confidence.
4. Hedged. "I couldn't find much verified information about this business." The AI found you but didn't trust what it saw. A thin or contradictory web footprint does this.

Keep screenshots and notes of every run. This is your baseline. Re-run the same prompts in three months and you'll know whether your fixes are working, rather than guessing.

Five common reasons AI gets a business wrong (and the fixes)

1. Your basic facts disagree across the web

An old phone number in one directory, two versions of your trading name, the premises you moved out of in 2023 still listed somewhere. Machines treat contradiction as risk, and risky businesses don't get recommended. Fix: settle on one canonical set of details and make everything match: website footer, Google Business Profile, social profiles, every directory. Update or remove dead listings.

2. Your website never quite says what you do

Plenty of sites lead entirely with mood: "Quality you can trust. Excellence as standard." Lovely, but none of it tells a machine that you fit bathrooms in Glastonbury. Fix: plain statements near the top of every key page covering what you offer, where, and for whom. Give each main service its own page and name the towns you actually cover.

3. Nobody else corroborates you

If your own website is the only place on the internet saying you're good, AI hesitates, just as a cautious customer would. Fix: genuine, recent reviews (ask for them, and keep asking), the directories relevant to your trade, trade body memberships, local press where you can earn it. Corroboration is what AI leans on when deciding who to name.

4. Machines can't read your site

Key information locked inside images, text that only appears after heavy scripts run, no structured data, or a robots.txt file that blocks AI crawlers outright. The business may be excellent; the site is mute. Fix: a technical once-over: schema markup for your business and services, real text on the page, and a deliberate decision about which AI crawlers you allow. This is developer territory, and it's part of how we approach every website we design and build.

5. Old information is still out there

A service you stopped offering, prices from 2022 in a forgotten PDF, coverage of a previous owner. Models trained on an older snapshot of the web will repeat it. Fix: update or redirect stale pages, put dates on anything time-sensitive, and keep your Google Business Profile current. Tools with live search reflect corrections within weeks; built-in model knowledge catches up more slowly.

Most of these fixes are achievable within a month, and they compound. Conveniently, they're also the foundations of good SEO and GEO generally. Nothing here is wasted effort even if AI never sends you a single lead.

Common questions

How often should I check what ChatGPT says about my business?

Quarterly is a sensible rhythm for most small businesses. AI models are updated periodically and their web search results shift constantly, so a one-off check goes stale. Put a repeating reminder in the diary and re-run the same set of prompts each time, so you can compare like with like.

Why does ChatGPT give me a different answer each time I ask?

Because it generates each answer fresh rather than fetching a stored one. Some variation is normal, which is why we suggest running each prompt several times in fresh chats. You are looking for the pattern across runs: if you are consistently absent, that is a signal; a single odd answer is not.

Can I get ChatGPT to correct wrong information about my business?

Not directly; there is no dashboard for editing what AI says about you. The reliable route is fixing the sources: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories and reviews. AI tools that search the web reflect those sources within weeks; corrections to a model's built-in knowledge follow more slowly, as models are retrained.

Do Claude and Gemini give the same recommendations as ChatGPT?

Often not, because each has different training data, different web search sources and different habits when citing them. That is why we recommend checking at least three tools. A business can be recommended warmly by one and invisible to another, and knowing which is which tells you where to focus.

Rather have us run the check for you?

We're Bare Creative: Jack and Carly, a web design and digital studio in Somerset. Running this exact audit is how we start every SEO and GEO engagement: we test the prompts, trace the errors back to their sources, and fix them in order of impact. If you'd like to know what AI is telling your customers about you (before your competitors find out what it's telling theirs), get in touch and we'll take a look.