Here’s an uncomfortable little exercise for a Monday morning: open ChatGPT and ask it to recommend a business like yours. Most owners never do. They assume that if they turn up on Google, they’re covered. But the customer who used to type “plumber near me” into a search bar is now just as likely to ask an assistant, “my boiler’s making a knocking noise, who should I call in Leeds?”- and get three names back. The only question that matters is whether one of them is you.
You don’t need any tools to find out. You need about ten minutes and a bit of honesty about what you see.
Ask the questions your customers actually ask
Open ChatGPT, Claude, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity in separate tabs. Then ask each of them the sort of thing a real customer would – not a tidy marketing phrase, but the messy, specific question someone types at 9pm when they’ve got a problem.
For a kitchen fitter in Chelmsford, that might be:
- “Who are the best kitchen fitters in Chelmsford?”
- “I need a fitted kitchen installed near Chelmsford – who should I contact?”
- “Recommend a reliable kitchen company in Essex for a £15k renovation.”
Ask three or four variations. The wording matters more than you’d think. “Best” pulls a different list than “reliable” or “affordable”, and each of those is a real customer with a real intent behind it.
Write down what you see
For every answer, note three things. Did it name your business? Which competitors did it name? And, this is the important one – did it say why?
Ask the follow-up out loud: “Why did you recommend them?” The reply tells you what the assistant thinks it knows: years established, specialisms, the sentiment of their reviews, the areas they cover. If a competitor gets a rich, specific paragraph and you get a shrug, you’ve just found your problem in about ninety seconds.
Pay attention to the silences
Not being mentioned isn’t a personal insult. Nine times out of ten it means the assistant couldn’t find clear, structured information about you – so it played it safe and named the businesses it could describe with confidence. AI models hate looking wrong. If your details are vague or buried, you simply don’t get put forward.
A few honest caveats
These answers wobble, so don’t hang everything on a single run. Ask each question a couple of times. Results are also influenced by location and past chats, and assistants occasionally invent a business that doesn’t exist. Ignore the one-offs and look for the pattern across several answers and several tools. The pattern is the truth.
What to do with what you find
If you’re consistently invisible, the fixes are more boring than you’d hope and more effective than you’d expect: a homepage that states plainly what you do and where, an FAQ that answers the questions people actually ask, structured data so machines can read your details, and a quick check that you’re not accidentally blocking AI crawlers. We’ll dig into each of these over the coming weeks.
If you’d rather not grade your own homework, that’s the entire reason Grow Hero exists. Run a free scan and you’ll get one score out of 100 and a short, prioritised list of what to fix first – no BS, no fifty-tab spreadsheet.