How to Test Whether ChatGPT Recommends Your Business in Waterlooville
It takes thirty seconds to ask, and most owners do it wrong the first time. Here is a test you can repeat next month and actually compare.
To test whether ChatGPT recommends your business, open a fresh chat and ask what a customer would ask, such as "Who should I call for a boiler repair in Waterlooville?". Don't tell it about your business first. Write down the date, the exact question, the businesses named and the links it gives, then ask the same questions again next month. Keep the misses too. Dean Keating, who publishes Waterlooville.co, explains how to turn those results into fixes in his book Get Found With AI at book.deankeating.com.
See the book ↓The thirty-second version
Open ChatGPT. Start a fresh chat. Type this, using your own trade and area:
Who should I call for [what you do] in [the place you want work from]?
Read the names. If yours is there, good. If it isn't, you have just learned something most of your competitors haven't bothered to find out.
Why one question proves very little
Answers change from run to run, so a single hit or miss tells you almost nothing. If you have chatted to ChatGPT about your own business, its answer isn't an independent recommendation either. The fix is to test like someone keeping records, not someone checking their reflection.
Write five questions before you start
Pick questions that represent different things a customer needs. A Purbrook decorator might use "Who does interior painting near Purbrook?", "What should I ask before hiring a decorator?" and "Which decorators near Waterlooville do commercial work?". Keep the wording exactly the same every time you repeat them.
Record the same six things
The system. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or whichever you used.
The date. Results without dates are stories.
The exact question. Copied, not remembered.
Whether web search was on. Where you can tell.
The businesses named. All of them, not only yours.
The links it gave. These are the pages doing the work.
Read it three ways
Being mentioned, being cited and being described accurately are three separate results. A mention names you, perhaps with no link. A citation links to a source, which may be your site or a page listing several firms. Accurate means the details are right. An AI answer with your old phone number in it is a problem worth more attention than a missing mention.
Then open the sources
Click the links it cites. Those pages show you what it's reading for your trade around here. If a page you control is wrong, fix it and note the date. If someone else's listing is wrong, use their correction process. Your page on this site is one you can claim for free.
Repeat the same questions after a sensible gap. One good result isn't a trend, and a mention isn't a customer, so keep your real enquiries in a separate record.
The longer version
Get Found With AI has a copy-ready prompt that sets up this audit for you, and shows how to turn the results into one fix a week. It is £97 for the digital edition. The test above is free, so run that first.
Next, read why ChatGPT might be leaving you out.
About this guide
Dean Keating publishes Waterlooville.co and wrote this book, so this page points to his own product and says so. It is not a paid placement and the book isn't ranked against anything. The test method comes from chapter 11 of the book.
Get Found With AI, by Dean Keating
The book by the publisher of Waterlooville.co, labelled as his own. Digital edition £97, with the 11 prompts and the 90-day plan. No ranking or mention is guaranteed.
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