The most direct way to find out is also the simplest: open ChatGPT, Google's AI, or Perplexity and ask the exact question a customer would ask — "best [your type of business] in [your city]" — and read what comes back. Do this a few different ways before drawing any conclusion, because a single answer from a single tool doesn't tell you much on its own.
Ask it the way a real customer would
Don't search for your own business name — you already know it exists. Ask the question a stranger would type: "best HVAC company near me," "top-rated med spa in [city]," "who does the best [service] in [city]." That's the question that actually matters, because that's the one deciding whether you get chosen.
Check more than one engine
ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini don't all pull from the same sources or weigh them the same way. A business can be named by one and missing from another. If you only check the tool you personally use, you're seeing a fraction of the picture — and a customer researching you might be using a different one entirely.
Ask more than one version of the question
"Best [category] near me," "who should I hire for [service]," and "[category] recommendations in [city]" can return different lists even on the same engine. Try several phrasings that match how customers actually talk, not just the one that sounds most like a search-engine keyword.
Read past the top name
If you're not first, check whether you're mentioned at all further down, or in a follow-up answer if you ask "what about [your business]?" Being second or third named is a very different situation from not appearing anywhere — one is a ranking problem, the other is a visibility problem, and the fix is different for each.
Why doing this by hand only gets you so far
Checking manually tells you the state of things today, on the specific questions you thought to ask, on the engines you happened to try. It doesn't tell you whether that's typical, whether it's gotten better or worse, or which of the dozen questions your actual buyers ask are the ones you're failing. A single check is a snapshot; knowing where you stand takes running the fuller set of questions across every major engine at once.
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