The Digital Doctor

Can ChatGPT recommend my business?

Only if it can work out what you do, where you do it and what you charge. Assistants build answers out of pages that state those things plainly in text. If your services sit inside a picture, or your prices are only in a PDF, there is nothing for an assistant to quote and it will name a competitor who wrote it down instead. You can test this yourself in about five minutes, and most of the fixes cost nothing.

What follows is how to check, what actually decides the answer, and what is worth doing about it. Including the part most people selling this will not tell you.

How do I check whether ChatGPT already knows about my business?

Ask it the way a customer would. Not “tell me about Acme Plumbing”, which only proves it can read your website when handed the name. Ask “recommend a plumber in Boksburg”, which is what somebody looking to hire one actually types.

Ask five or six variations. For a plumber in Boksburg that might be:

Write down who it names. Those are your competitors as far as an assistant is concerned, which may not be the same list you had in your head. Then do the same in Gemini and Perplexity, because they read the web differently and often answer differently.

Why does the answer change every time I ask?

Because assistants do not have rankings. There is no position three to occupy. A study running nearly three thousand identical prompts found the odds of the same recommendation list appearing twice were under one in a hundred.

That matters commercially. If somebody offers to tell you your “AI ranking position”, they are selling you a number that will not be there tomorrow. What can be measured honestly is how often you appear across many attempts, and who appears instead when you do not. That is a real signal. A single screenshot is not.

What decides whether an assistant can name you?

Four things, and you can check all of them yourself.

Can it read your site at all?

Some sites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended in robots.txt. Often nobody chose that. A plugin added it, or a developer copied a template that had it. If they cannot read your site, they cannot name you, and no amount of other work will fix it. Check yours at yoursite.co.za/robots.txt.

Are the facts in text, or in a picture?

This is the one that catches most businesses. A beautifully designed page where the services are part of the header graphic reads, to an assistant, as a page about nothing. Prices in a downloadable PDF are invisible. Trading hours in an image are invisible. If a fact matters to a buyer, it has to be selectable text on the page.

Do you answer the questions people actually ask?

Assistants quote pages that answer one question directly. A page headed “Does laser hair removal hurt?” followed by a straight answer is quotable. A services page listing “Laser Hair Removal” as a bullet point is not. This is why an honest FAQ page, written from the questions customers really ask you, does more for AI visibility than almost anything else.

Is there a machine-readable summary?

Structured data is a hidden block on the page stating your name, what you do, where you are, your hours and your prices in a fixed format. It is not a ranking trick. It removes the guesswork, and an assistant that does not have to guess is more willing to name you.

Is this worth worrying about yet?

Less than most people selling it will tell you, and I would rather say so.

AI tools currently send a very small share of all web traffic. For a local business the picture is thinner still: when somebody searches for a plumber near them, Google overwhelmingly still shows the map results, and those searches rarely trigger an AI answer at all. If anybody tells you that AI is taking your customers today, ask them for the number.

What makes it worth doing now is not urgency. It is that the fixes are cheap, they are the same fixes that help ordinary search, and almost nobody in South Africa has done them yet. Putting your prices in text and writing a real FAQ page would be worth doing if ChatGPT had never existed.

What should I actually do?

  1. Check robots.txt for anything blocking the AI crawlers, and remove it unless you meant it.
  2. Move your services, prices, trading hours and the town you serve out of images and into text on the page.
  3. Write an FAQ page answering the ten questions customers genuinely ask you, in their words, with straight answers underneath.
  4. Add structured business data so your details are machine-readable rather than inferred.
  5. Get listed and reviewed where you can. Assistants lean heavily on third-party mentions, so a claimed Google Business Profile and real reviews do more than another page of website copy.
  6. Re-test in a month. Not once, several times, and count how often you appear.

How do I get this checked properly?

The free check on this site scores whether your page gives an assistant what it needs: machine-readable details, an FAQ it can quote, questions in the words people ask, and whether your prices, hours and town appear as text. That costs nothing and needs no sign up.

The Vitals audit, at R2,800, is where I do it by hand. I ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for a business like yours several different ways, screenshot every answer, and put them in your report along with who they named instead of you. Every check in every package is listed here.

See where you stand

The free check scores your AI visibility along with nine other things, instantly, with no sign up.

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