Check if AI recommends my business

Write the buyer questions

Write the questions before you open any chat. Five is enough for a first pass. Each question should be a job a real customer has, written the way they would type it, with your brand left out. Add a city only if a buyer would add one. For software, an online shop, a course, or a service you sell in many places, leave the city out or say online.

Weak prompts mention you or flatter you: “Is our firm the top choice for payroll?” Strong prompts are the ones you wish a stranger would ask. “Simple payroll for a 12-person nonprofit.” “Emergency plumber in Madison who works weekends.” “Where to order replacement parts for a standing desk.” “Therapist with evening visits online.” Save the list in a document you can reuse. Reusing it is how you notice change later. If you rewrite the question every time, you cannot tell a real shift from a new prompt.

Record every name

Open the four assistants and paste the first question into a new chat on each one. Do not follow it with “be thorough” or “make sure you include us.” Copy every business name from the reply into a sheet with one column per assistant. Add a column for sources when the reply cites a page. Mark your own business as named or absent. Then move to the next question and do the same thing.

Keep the sheet literal. A name is in the reply or it is not. A hint such as “a shop on Main Street” does not count unless your public name is written out. If you operate two brands, decide which name a buyer has to see and use that name for the whole check. Switching names halfway will make the sheet look better, or worse, than the buyer’s experience.

After the category questions, ask one question that uses your name: what the assistant knows about your business. Put that answer on its own row and keep it out of the recommendation tally. That row tells you whether you can be described. It does not tell you whether a stranger will be offered your name. Mixing the rows is the most common way to walk away thinking you are visible when the buyer questions never mention you.

Read the sheet

Read the finished sheet for three patterns. Which assistants never name you? Which questions fail on every assistant? Which other names, and which sites, show up again and again? The repeated names are who you are being compared with. The repeated sites are the directories, review pages, and articles you may need to join or correct. Those two lists are more useful than a vague sense that “AI does not know us.”

Location can tilt a reply even when you thought you asked a general question. An assistant may assume a city from the account or the network. If you sell online, note that, and try the question once in a private window. If you serve one city, keep the city in the prompt so you are not judged against a national list you never tried to win. Write the condition next to the row so future you remembers how the question was asked.

One filled-in sheet

The card on this page is that sheet filled in for a real business, with the name removed. Twenty-eight customer-style answers. Four assistants. Zero mentions of the business. National lenders and directories occupied the slots a recommendation could have given to the company itself. The separate by-name question still produced a description. A single friendly chat would have hidden that split. The sheet made it obvious.

From the sheet to a fix

A handmade log is enough to see a rough pattern. It gets shaky when the wording drifts between assistants, when you forget which window was logged in, or when the citations are lost. MentionMeter asks buyer-style questions for the industry and place you enter. For a city, the shape is the kind of “best in this place” question buyers type. For online, the city is left out. The free Snapshot is emailed and says whether you were mentioned. It is not a 0–100 index.

The $39 report is the version you keep. It lists the other businesses named in the replies, the review and listing sites you are missing, and a 30-day fix list. The optional re-check is $19 a month. It asks the same kind of questions again so you can see whether the replies moved. It does not start unless you add it. Use the handmade sheet if you want to learn the shape of the problem today. Use the Snapshot if you want the four assistants run the same way, with a record you can compare next time.

Before you change the website, circle one question you lost on every assistant and one source that kept appearing. That pair is your first fix: a page that answers the question in plain text, and a profile or citation on the source the replies already trust. Then run those questions again. A check that never gets repeated is a story. A check you can lay next to last month’s sheet is a measurement.