What actually happens when someone asks
When a customer types "best electrician in Sacramento" into a chat box, the assistant does one of two things, and often both. It leans on associations formed during training, which is why it can name a national chain with no help at all. And it runs a live search, pulls back a small number of pages, reads them, and composes two or three recommendations out of what those pages happen to say.
That second step is where local businesses are won and lost. The assistant reads maybe five to fifteen pages. If your name is not in them, you are not in the answer, and no amount of quality fixes that on its own.
The five causes, in the order they usually apply
- Thin third-party coverage. Nobody outside your own website has written your name next to your city and your trade. Roundups, review platforms, local press, chamber and association pages are the pool assistants draw from.
- A Business Profile that is incomplete or in the wrong category. Almost everything an assistant reads about local businesses sits downstream of that profile, so a wrong primary category quietly mislabels you everywhere.
- Reviews with no words in them. Star ratings barely help. Review text that names the specific job ("replaced our panel", "same-day water heater") is what an assistant can quote back.
- A website that never states the plain facts. Service area, services, hours, and the entity name written as sentences, not baked into a hero image or a slider.
- Name ambiguity. If two businesses in your region share most of a name, or your legal name and your trading name differ across sources, the assistant may resolve you to the wrong entity, or skip you rather than guess.
What does not cause it
You are not being penalized, and you have not been left out of a database you need to join. There is no submission form for ChatGPT and no paid inclusion in its recommendations. Anyone who offers to add you to an AI index is selling something that does not exist.
Where to start
Run the script below before you change anything. Most owners discover one of two things: either they are never named, which points at coverage, or they are named for some questions and not others, which points at a specific gap you can close in an afternoon.
The six-prompt self-check
Paste these one at a time into ChatGPT, then repeat the whole set in Gemini. Use a logged-out or temporary chat so your own history does not prime the answer, and swap in your trade and city.
6 prompts, in order
best [trade] in [city]who should I call for [the specific job you want, e.g. an emergency water heater replacement] in [city]most reliable [trade] near [neighborhood or suburb], and whycompare the top [trade] companies in [city] for someone who needs [job] this weekis [your business name] in [city] any goodwho are the main competitors to [your business name] in [city]
- For prompts one to four, write down every business the assistant names, in order. That list is your real competitive set, whether or not you agree with it.
- Count how many of the four you were named in. Zero out of four is a coverage problem. Two or three out of four is a specificity problem, usually on the job-level questions.
- For prompt five, note what it says about you and whether any of it is wrong. Wrong facts are the fastest thing to fix.
- For prompt six, note whether it can name your competitors but not you. That is the clearest possible signal that the gap is coverage, not quality.
- Save the answers with today's date. Without a baseline you cannot tell later whether anything you changed worked.
Two assistants is the minimum worth trusting. They retrieve different pages, so being named by one and missed by the other is common and tells you the sources disagree about you.
You are looking for the term
AI visibility
What you just measured has a name. The share of buyer questions where an assistant names you is called your mention rate, and the broader discipline of tracking and improving it is called AI visibility, or generative engine optimization if you are reading marketing material. Knowing the term is mostly useful for searching: it is what everything else on this subject is filed under.
- Can I submit my business to ChatGPT?
- No. There is no submission form, no directory to join, and no paid placement inside an assistant's recommendations. You change what the assistant reads about you, not the assistant.
- I rank first on Google. Why does that not carry over?
- Google ranks pages for a query. An assistant names businesses inside a sentence. Those are different jobs: one needs a page worth clicking, the other needs a checkable claim about an entity that appears in more than one place.
- 01Overview of OpenAI crawlersOpenAI
- 02Web search toolOpenAI
- 03AI features and your websiteGoogle Search Central
- 04GEO: Generative Engine OptimizationAggarwal et al., arXiv
Every link above was opened and confirmed reachable on September 1, 2026.
The automated version
See what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity say about your business
The free scan runs the buyer questions for your trade and city across all four assistants, shows who gets named instead of you, and lists the sources those answers came from. No signup, about thirty seconds.
Run my free scan