Is ChatGPT recommending your competitors instead of you?

You can find out in five minutes whether ChatGPT recommends your competitors, and all it takes is asking it the way a customer would. Open ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and ask for a recommendation in your line of work. If it names you and describes you correctly, the answer is no. If it names a competitor and leaves you out, the answer is yes, and the reasons below are where to start. There's no shortcut, because it all comes down to what has been written about your business and about theirs. If you can spare an hour, there's a fuller version of the check in our answer to whether small and medium businesses need to worry about AI search.

Why it matters

People are using AI assistants more every month. Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 counted 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million a year earlier. Nobody has measured how many of those visits were people choosing a supplier. When someone does ask, though, an assistant names a handful of options rather than a page of them, and if you aren't in that handful, you may never be considered at all.

What an assistant has to go on

An assistant can only work from what has been written about you: your own website, your reviews, press coverage, directories and whatever people say about you online. The clearer and more consistent that picture is, the more confidently it can describe you, and the more likely it is to recommend you.

Why businesses get missed

• A website that doesn't say clearly what you do and who you do it for. The fix is learning to explain what you do in one sentence.
• Few reviews or mentions on respected sites other than your own.
• A business described one way on one site and another way on the next.
• Competitors whose expertise and coverage are far easier to find than yours.

What to do about it

• Make your core pages clear, specific and factual.
• Put your website on every page that mentions your business, and make sure the details match on each one.
• Build reviews and mentions on the sites that matter in your sector, starting with your local listings.
• Publish expert content that's genuinely useful.
• Ask the assistants again every few months, and go and put right whatever they've got wrong.

Our free AI score, still in beta, gives you a headline number in about 20 seconds. If you'd rather someone fixed the problem for you, that's what our AI search visibility service is for.