Free check / Guides
How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business
Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask, without your company name, in a temporary chat with personalization off. Note whether you are named, in what position, and who is named instead. Ask each question more than once, because answers vary. The GEO free check does this for three questions in about two minutes.
Published by UrbanoDX, the studio that builds and runs GEO.
The manual check, step by step
You need ChatGPT and a spreadsheet with one row per answer.
- Write five to ten buyer questions without your name. Use the words a customer types before they know you: “Which CRM should a 10-person sales team use?”, not “Is Acme CRM any good?”. Add your city or country if you sell locally.
- Open a temporary chat with personalization off. OpenAI says a temporary chat can still use your memories and custom instructions unless you turn personalization off before the conversation begins. Your own history could tilt the answer toward you.
- Ask each question and record four things: whether you are named, your position among the names, who is named instead, and which websites the answer links to.
- Ask each question again in a new temporary chat. Answers vary between runs, so one answer is an anecdote. Two or three runs show whether a name is stable or a one-off.
- Note whether ChatGPT searched the web. OpenAI says ChatGPT may search automatically when a question benefits from current information. An answer with sources was built from pages it just read; one without comes from what the model learned.
- Check that OpenAI's search crawler can read your site. Your robots.txt must not block OAI-SearchBot: OpenAI says sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. GPTBot is a separate setting that covers model training.
A worked example: a site we built, named in none of ten answers
Buy Houses Japan (buyhouses.jp) is a property search site for foreign buyers, built by UrbanoDX. Our weekly ranking asks ChatGPT ten buyer questions such as “What is the best website to buy a house in Japan as a foreigner?”. In the measurement of 16 October 2026 the answers named 22 brands. Buy Houses Japan was not one of them.
The useful part is what was named instead. The answers linked suumo.jp in 6 of 10, and athome.co.jp, homes.co.jp and realestate.co.jp in 5 each: the sources ChatGPT treats as authorities for this market, and the first places to study. This week's Japan property ranking.
| Brand | Answers naming it, of 10 |
|---|---|
| Akiya Japan | 6 |
| SUUMO | 5 |
| At Home | 5 |
| Real Estate Japan | 5 |
| LIFULL | 5 |
| Buy Houses Japan | 0 |
ChatGPT, US location, answering from memory without live web search, measured 16 October 2026.
What a manual check cannot tell you
- It covers one assistant. Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews can name different companies; repeat the steps in each one you care about.
- Ten answers are a sample. A brand named in 5 of 10 and one named in 4 of 10 are not clearly different.
- Being named is not being recommended: an answer can name a company to warn against it. Read the sentence around your name.
- ChatGPT can use location to find local results, so a buyer in another city may see a different list.
Let GEO run it for you
The GEO free check does steps 1, 3 and 6 for you. It reads your homepage, writes the questions buyers in your market ask, asks ChatGPT the three with the most buying intent without your brand name, and reads your robots.txt rules for AI crawlers. You get a score out of 100, the companies named instead, the sites the answers link to and a ranked list of fixes.
The GEO free check asks ChatGPT only: OpenAI's model through the API, answering from memory without live web search. Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews are not live in GEO. Daily tracking in the GEO console runs ChatGPT and Qwen as part of UrbanoDX's service, with no public price.
To track several engines every day, a paid tracker fits better: see Otterly.AI alternatives for prices checked on 17 October 2026.
Questions
Can I check if ChatGPT recommends my business for free?
Yes. Ask ChatGPT your buyers' questions yourself, in a temporary chat with personalization off and without your company name, and record who it names. The GEO free check automates this for three questions on ChatGPT. HubSpot's AI Search Grader is another free check; it asks AI models what they say about your brand by name.
Why does ChatGPT give different answers to the same question?
Answers vary from run to run, so names and their order change. ChatGPT may also search the web for some questions and not others, and it can use your location and, unless you turn personalization off, your memories. Ask each question more than once before you draw a conclusion.
Does ChatGPT need to crawl my website to recommend me?
Not always. Without web search, ChatGPT answers from what its model learned. With web search, OpenAI says sites that opt out of its OAI-SearchBot crawler will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigational links. Allowing OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt keeps your pages eligible.
What should I do if ChatGPT does not name my business?
Start with who it names instead and which websites its answers link to. Answer your buyers' questions directly on your own site, get listed and reviewed on the sites those answers cite, and make sure AI crawlers can read your pages. Then ask the same questions again a few weeks later.
Sources
Every page below was read on 17 October 2026. Vendors change plans often: follow the links for today's terms.
Does ChatGPT name your business?
Three of your buyers' questions, asked to ChatGPT without your name: your score, who is named instead and what to fix. Free, about two minutes.