Nine at night, Cedar Park, water coming through the kitchen ceiling. The homeowner doesn't open Google. She opens ChatGPT and types "I need an emergency plumber tonight — who should I call?" She gets three companies and a sentence on each. She calls the first one.
No search results page. No ad. No click on anybody's website. Just three names — and if yours isn't one of them, that job was never yours to lose.
So: does your business show up in ChatGPT? Most owners have never checked. There's no dashboard for AI search visibility yet, no rank tracker you log into. You check it the way you'd check anything — you ask, and you write down what happened.
The 10-prompt check
Put your trade and your city in. You'll get the ten questions homeowners actually type — then run them yourself and mark every answer that named you.
How to run it so the result means something
-
Use a logged-out or temporary chat
ChatGPT remembers you. If it has your business in its memory it will name you when nothing else in the world would. You're not scoring your own account — you're scoring a stranger's.
-
Run all four surfaces, not just one
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the Google AI Overview at the top of a normal search. They pull from different sources. Strong in one and invisible in three is a normal result, and worth knowing which is which.
-
Write down who did get named
That list is your real competitive set now. It's usually not the companies you think about — it's whoever has their information in order.
-
Save the score and the date
Run it again in 30 days. The direction tells you more than the number.
What decides whether AI names you
Generative engine optimization — GEO, sometimes called answer engine optimization — sounds like an agency invention. Underneath, it's four unglamorous inputs.
SIGNAL 01
Entity consistency
Same business name, address, phone and service area everywhere — site, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Angi, Facebook. "Ste 4" in one place and "Suite #4" in another reads as two half-credible companies.
SIGNAL 02
Quotable specifics
Real price ranges, response times, brands you service, neighborhoods you cover. A model repeats sentences. "Contact us for pricing" is not a sentence anyone can repeat.
SIGNAL 03
Third-party corroboration
Recent reviews, directory listings, local press, supplier pages. AI trusts what other sites say about you well above what you say about yourself. Forty reviews from this year beat two hundred from 2021.
SIGNAL 04
Machine-readable structure
LocalBusiness schema, real headings, text as text. A phone number baked into a JPEG doesn't exist. Neither does a service list living inside a slider.
If you scored zero
That's not a penalty. There's no ban list and nothing to appeal. A zero means there isn't enough consistent, quotable, corroborated text about your company for a model to risk putting your name in an answer. It's silence, not rejection — and silence is fixable, usually in four to eight weeks, because in most cities the bar is on the floor.
⚠ THREE THINGS NOT TO BUY
"Guaranteed #1 spot in ChatGPT." There's no ranking to buy, no ad slot, no placement. "AI indexing or registration service." There is nothing to register with. Results in seven days. Sources have to be re-crawled and re-ingested before your change reaches an answer.
Do this in one sitting
- Run the ten prompts above in ChatGPT, then again in Perplexity
- Write down the three competitors named instead of you
- Fix every address and phone number that doesn't match your Google Business Profile
- Publish one page answering your most-asked pricing question with real numbers
- Put the same check in your calendar for this day next month
The score you get today is a baseline, and baselines are only embarrassing once. The five steps that move it are in how to show up when your customers ask AI — start with whichever of the four signals you just failed hardest.