Your Customers Are Asking AI About You. Here's How to Find Out What It Says.

Someone in your town needs exactly what you sell. A year ago, they would have typed it into Google and picked from the companies on the map.

This year, there is close to a 50/50 chance they opened ChatGPT instead and asked it who they should call.

That is not a prediction. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 45% of consumers have asked an AI tool for a local business recommendation in the past year. The same survey put that number at 6% the year before. AI has become the third most common way people find a local business, behind only Google and Facebook, and ahead of Yelp and TripAdvisor. ChatGPT leads the pack at 31% of consumers, with Google's AI Mode at 23%.

Pew Research Center tells the same story from a different angle. As of February 2026, 49% of American adults say they use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024. About a quarter of all adults use one every day.

A version of your company already lives inside these AI models, whether you have ever opened one or not. Ask ChatGPT about your company, and it will describe you as it knows you; it's just using words you didn't write.

We've All Heard This Before

You have heard a version of this warning before. Twenty years ago, the warning was that your customers were already searching Google and you had better be listed. So it is fair to wonder whether this is the same pitch with a new look.

Here's what is actually different this time.

Google ranked you. AI describes you. When your company came up in search results, the words on the screen were words you wrote. Your own headline, your own page, your own description of what you do. In a search engine result, a customer or potential customer is reading what you wrote.

Now something else is writing about you, and that information is coming from directory listings, old reviews, and other people's descriptions of your company. You are no longer the author of your own listing.

There is no page two. A search engine's results page has ten links, plus the three companies Google puts on the map at the top. Ranking seventh on the first page wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible. Ask ChatGPT who the best plumber in town is, and it names three or four companies, then stops. Nobody scrolls down, because there is nothing to scroll to.

Your customers check your work, not ours. This is the part that surprises many people. When someone gets a recommendation from an AI tool, they don't just act on it. BrightLocal found that 88% of people who use AI for recommendations verify what the AI told them, either by checking the source or by confirming the quoted reviews are real.

Nearly all survey respondents said they sometimes read actual reviews before deciding. So the AI answer gets you considered. Your reviews and your listing close the deal. Both have to be right, and they have to agree.

One more shift is worth knowing. People are spreading out. The share of consumers using Google reviews dropped from 83% to 71% in a single year while Apple Maps, TikTok, and ChatGPT all grew. You can no longer simply live inside Google's ecosystem; ChatGPT, Perplexity, and every other AI tool that can't see Google's reviews have nothing to go on when a customer asks about you.

The Fifteen-Minute Audit

Most marketers and business owners have never read what AI says about their own companies. Here is how to find out what AI is saying about you, and it only takes about fifteen minutes.

Before you start

Open two different AI tools. Put ChatGPT in one browser tab. In another tab, go to google.com and click the AI Mode tab above the search box. You're going to run the same six questions (prompts) in both. ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode pull from different sources, so they most likely won't give you matching answers. Where they're different will tell you something all by itself.

Start from a blank slate. In ChatGPT, open a temporary chat or sign out completely if you have a ChatGPT account. If you are signed in and you have talked about your company before, ChatGPT will tell you what it remembers from those conversations instead of what it tells a stranger.

Ask each question twice. Ask the same question (prompt) twice, and you will most likely get two different answers back. That's normal. These AI tools don't look up a fixed list the way a search engine does; they write a fresh answer every time. So if your company shows up the first time and disappears the second time, write that down. Appearing in one answer out of two means roughly half the people asking about you will never see your company name, so don't count it as a win.

Save everything. Open a blank document and add a heading for each of the six questions (prompts) below. Under each heading, paste the entire answer from ChatGPT and the entire answer from Google's AI Mode, then date the page. Paste the whole response instead of summarizing it. You'll run this again in about three months to see whether anything you fixed actually changed, and by then you won't remember what the first answers were.

The Six Prompts

Copy these, fill in your own details, and work through them in order. The examples in parentheses use a plumbing company in Flint, MI, so you can see what one result looks like with the blanks filled in.
Prompt 1. Are you on the list at all?
Who are the best [your product/service] in [your city, state]? Give me your top five with a sentence about each one.

(Ex: Who are the best plumbers in Flint, Michigan? Give me your top five with a sentence about each one.)
This is the closest thing to what a real customer would ask, and it answers the only question that matters at first: are you named or not.

Don't stop at looking for your company name. Write down every company that the AI model lists and the order it lists them in. That is your real competition in this channel, and it's often not the list you would have written yourself. Look hard at any company you don't recognize. If a competitor you consider smaller than you is showing up while you are not, they are doing something with their listings or their reviews that's working.

Then ask AI again using the words your customers would use instead of the words your industry uses. "Who can fix a leaking water heater in Flint" will often produce a different list than "best plumbers in Flint."

Prompt 2. Does it have your facts right?
Tell me everything you know about [your exact company name] in [your city]. Include what they do, who owns the company, when it was founded, what areas they serve, and how big the company is.

Now you are checking accuracy instead of presence. Go through the answer line by line against what you know is true. The details that are most often wrong are the founding year, the owner names, the number of employees, the service area, and services you stopped offering years ago or started offering last year.

Watch for wrong answers delivered confidently. These AI tools almost never say they are unsure. ChatGPT will state a founding year in exactly the same tone whether it knows the year or invented it. Anything wrong here is wrong because a source somewhere on the web says so, and finding that source is part of the fix.

Prompt 3. What does it think of your reputation?
What do people say about working with [your company name]? What do customers praise, and what do they complain about?
The answer tells you two things. First, which review platforms the tool is actually reading, because it will usually name them. Second, whether the reputation it describes matches the company you believe you are running.

If the answer is that it can't find much, that is still a finding, not a dead end. It means your reviews are either too thin to summarize or locked inside a platform this particular AI tool can't see.

Prompt 4. Can a customer actually reach you?
What are [your company name]'s hours, phone number, and address? Are they open on Saturday?

Boring, and the most expensive thing on this list to get wrong. A wrong phone number or a wrong Saturday can mean a customer tried to reach you, couldn't, and then gave up. Check every digit of the phone number. Check the suite number. Check the hours against your real hours, including whatever you do on holidays and in your slow season.

Prompt 5. How do you look next to your competition?
How does [your company name] compare to [a competitor you respect] in [your city]? Which one would you recommend, and why?
Uncomfortable and worth doing. You're looking at how AI characterizes you, what words it uses, and what it believes your competitor does better. Sometimes the answer reminds you of a strength you have quietly stopped mentioning on your own website.
Prompt 6. What happens when someone is ready to buy?
I need [your service] and my budget is around [a typical job size for you]. Who should I call in [your city], and what should I expect to pay?

This is the question closest to an actual purchase, and it is the one most likely to produce a price you never published. If the tool invents a number, you want to know what number your prospects are carrying in their head before they call you.

What You're Going To Find

Now, sort everything you collected into three piles.

Your company is not there. This is the most common result, and it is not a judgment on the quality of your work. SOCi, a software company that manages local listings and reviews for companies with many locations, looked at roughly 350,000 business locations for its 2026 Local Visibility Index and found that ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of them. Gemini recommended 11%. Perplexity recommended 7.4%.

Those same locations turned up 35.9% of the time in the group of companies Google displays on the map in local search results. Getting named by an AI tool is much harder right now than ranking well in ordinary search.

Your company is there, and something about it is wrong. SOCi also measured the accuracy of company details at 68% on ChatGPT and Perplexity, which means roughly one answer in three contained a mistake.

Gemini scored 100% on the same measure, and the reason is worth understanding. Gemini reads your Google Maps and Google Business Profile information directly. ChatGPT and Perplexity build a picture of you out of whatever they can find across the open web, which means outdated directory entries, stale pages, and other people's summaries of your company become part of their answers.

Your company is there, it is accurate, and it is forgettable. This one is easy to skip past, because nothing is wrong. You read the answer about your company, everything checks out, and you move on. Read the actual words again. A forgettable description sounds like this: "They are a plumbing company serving Flint and the surrounding area, offering repairs, installation, and emergency service. Customers describe them as reliable." Every word is true, and it would fit any competitor in town without changing a thing.

Now compare that to a description that mentions you have been family-owned since 1982, that you work on old boiler systems most companies will not touch, and that customers keep saying you explain the repair before you start it.

Every one of those details came from a real source. They were sitting in a review, on a web page, or in a local news story, and the AI tool found them. The forgettable version is what you get when there is nothing specific to find.

The Fixes, Easiest First.

Fill out your Google Business Profile completely. It's free, you control it, and Google's own AI reads it directly, which is exactly why Gemini gets business details right more often than anything else. Complete every field. Write real descriptions for the services you actually provide. Upload photos taken this year. Answer the questions customers have posted. Google also uses AI to catch inaccurate profiles and fake reviews, so a complete, consistent profile is working with that system rather than against it. If you do only one thing on this list, do this one.

Make your details match everywhere. Your hours, phone number, address, and list of services should match across your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, Apple Maps, Yelp, and every industry directory you are listed in. This is tedious work, and it matters more than it used to. SOCi found that when AI tools cross-reference your details across platforms and find conflicts, they trust the listing less and recommend it less often.

Collect reviews somewhere besides Google. Companies that ChatGPT recommended averaged 4.3 stars. Reviews are working less like a score that moves you up and down. Fall below roughly four stars, and AI stops considering you at all. And because AI tools outside Google can't read Google's reviews, a reputation that exists only on Google is invisible to a large share of the AI tools your customers use. Ask your happiest customers to leave a review on a second platform. One or two a month adds up over a year.

Get other people talking about you. This one is slow, and it is where small businesses lose the most ground to bigger competitors. AI tools build confidence in a business from sources outside the business itself: local news coverage, association directories, supplier and partner pages, chamber listings, podcasts, trade publications. A company with an accurate website and nothing else pointing at it will always lose to a company the rest of the web keeps mentioning. Sponsoring the youth league, getting quoted in your trade magazine, and keeping your professional association listing current are all worth more now than they were two years ago.

Where This Leaves You

Nobody has this new AI strategy completely figured out. These tools change every few weeks, the research is early, and anyone promising you a guaranteed spot in an AI answer is selling something they can't deliver, just like the old SEO guys that used to promise a top position on the search engine results pages.

But the direction is clear enough to act on now. Nearly half of consumers are already asking AI. Most of them check what they are told. And the companies turning up in the answers are the ones with complete listings, reviews in more than one place, and other people vouching for them across the web. None of that is complicated. It is the same groundwork that has always made a company easy to find.

Run the six prompts this week, then put a reminder on your calendar to run them again in three months. Comparing the two will show you whether any of this worked.

If you would rather not do it yourself, fill out the contact form on our site and tell us your company name and your city. We will run all six questions for you and send back what we find, along with the two or three things we would fix first. No cost, and no pitch attached.