Field Guide › Does ChatGPT know my business exists?
Does ChatGPT know my business exists?
Probably not, and you can check in about two minutes. Open ChatGPT and ask it about your business by name. If it invents details, confuses you with someone else, or says it has no information, then as far as that assistant is concerned you do not exist — and it will recommend a competitor instead.
How do I check?
Two questions, in this order.
- Ask about yourself by name. "What can you tell me about [your business name] in [your town]?" You are not looking for praise here. You are looking for whether it knows anything true: what you do, where you work, when you're open.
- Ask again without naming yourself. "Who's the best [your business] in [your town]?" This is the one that matters, because this is the question a customer asks. It will name somebody. The only thing worth noticing is whether that somebody is you.
Do the second one in a brand-new chat. If you ask it in the same conversation, it will just repeat the business you told it about a minute ago, and you'll walk away thinking you're fine.
What if it gets me wrong?
Wrong is worse than nothing. Being unknown costs you the jobs you never hear about. Being described wrong costs you jobs you were about to get.
An assistant that confidently tells a customer you close at 5pm when you're open until 8, or that you don't cover their town when you've worked there for years, is turning that customer away for you. And it keeps doing it, every time someone asks, until the pages it reads say something different.
Why doesn't it know about me?
Because these assistants mostly repeat what they have already read, and only sometimes go and look something up on the spot.
So if your website says little about what you actually do and which towns you cover, and no other page on the internet describes you clearly, there is nothing there to repeat. It isn't a penalty and nobody decided against you. You simply were not part of what it learned.
Does this actually matter yet?
It matters more every month. A large share of searches now finish without anyone visiting a website at all, because the answer appeared right on the page or got typed out by a chatbot.
Those people are not lazy searchers. They are customers who asked a question, got a recommendation, and never saw a list of options to compare. If your name wasn't in the recommendation, you were never in the running.
Common follow-ups
Should I just tell ChatGPT about my business?
It won't remember. Anything you type into a chat affects that conversation and nothing else. Close the window and it's gone. What changes the answer other people get is what's published where the assistant can read it.
Is this the same as being on Google?
Related, but no. You can rank respectably on Google and still be invisible to an AI assistant, because the two are reading for different things. Plenty of businesses are sitting in exactly that spot and have no idea.
Can I fix this myself?
Some of it, yes. Make your website say plainly what you do, where you do it, and answer the questions customers actually ask you on the phone. That alone puts you ahead of most of your competitors. The rest — the technical side, and measuring whether any of it worked — is what we do.