How to Check If AI Recommends Your Business

Your customers have quietly changed how they pick a business. Instead of scrolling a page of links, more of them ask an assistant a direct question and go with a name it gives back. In 2026, Yext's Consumer Search Behaviors Report found that 47% of US adults used AI for local search in the past month, and 74% said they trust its local recommendations highly. If AI is naming businesses to half your market, you want to know whether it names you.

The problem is that this happens where you can't see it, inside private chats. You never get a notification that an assistant recommended a competitor. The only way to know is to check the way your customers do, on purpose. It takes about twenty minutes, and this is how to do it well.

"Am I recommended by AI" isn't a yes or no. When you ask an assistant for a business like yours, read the answer for four things.

• Are you named at all? The first and biggest question.
• Where do you land? First mention, buried in the middle, or a footnote.
• What does it say about you? The description an assistant gives is the pitch a customer reads. Make sure it's accurate and flattering.
• Who's named instead? The competitors that show up are your real AI rivals, which is useful to know even when you're named.

Write these down. A quick note per platform turns a vague feeling into something you can act on.

The answer you get depends entirely on the question. Don't ask "is [my business] good." Ask the way a buyer with a problem asks, before they know your name.

• "Best [service] in [city]," for example "best emergency electrician in Denver."
• "Who should I hire to [solve a problem] near me," like "who should I hire to regrout a shower near me."
• "Top rated [type of business] near me," the phrasing people use out loud.

Use your real city and service. Ask a few variations, because a small change in wording can surface a different set of names. The goal is to mirror how your customers search, not how you'd describe yourself.

Run the same questions through the assistants that recommend businesses today, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI. Their answers rarely match. Each one draws on different sources and updates on its own schedule, so you can be the top pick on one and completely absent on another.

Checking only the assistant you personally use is the most common mistake. Your customers aren't all using that one. If you skip the rest, you're guessing about most of the market. Google AI in particular shows up for people who never opened a chatbot on purpose, right inside their normal search.

Here's where to find each one.

It's tempting to feel good when you see your name and stop there. Resist that. Read critically:

• Is the description current? Assistants sometimes repeat old hours, a former address, or services you dropped. Wrong facts cost you jobs.
• Is anything missing? If you do emergency work and the answer doesn't mention it, that's a gap on the page the model read.
• What earns your competitors the mention? More reviews, a clearer page, a listing you don't have. Their strengths are your to-do list.

This is the same discipline behind getting recommended by AI in the first place. You fix what the answer reveals.

Here's the catch with a manual check. It's a snapshot, and the picture moves. Models update, competitors earn reviews, and the names in the answer shift week to week. A check you ran in March tells you little in August.

So treat AI visibility like you treat your reviews, as something you watch, not something you confirm once. At minimum, re-run your questions monthly. If that sounds like a chore to repeat by hand, that's exactly what Lighthouse Local's AI visibility tracker automates. It asks your questions on a schedule, records what each assistant says, and shows you movement over time instead of a single guess.

If you'd rather not open a stack of tabs and take notes, you can get a head start in one step. Our free AI visibility audit checks the signals AI reads on your pages and hands you the fixes, with no account required. From there, Lighthouse Local for Business watches what each assistant says between your manual checks, so a slip surfaces in days, not months. From a single location to an agency managing dozens of clients, our plans and pricing flex to match. Either way, you stop wondering where you stand in AI and start watching it.