There are two different questions hidden inside “does ChatGPT know my business?” First: can ChatGPT identify the company when you name it? Second: will ChatGPT surface the company when a buyer has not supplied the name? The second is commercially more important.
Test 1: branded recognition
Ask a factual question using the company name: “What is [Company] and what does it do?” Check the name, description, location, services, people and sources. This reveals entity understanding and stale or conflicting information.
Test 2: unbranded discovery
Ask the question a prospective customer would ask without naming you: “Which companies provide [service] in [market]?” If your business appears here, that is evidence of recommendation visibility rather than simple brand recognition.
Test 3: citation and source quality
If ChatGPT searches the web, inspect the cited sources. Are they your own website only? Are there external sources that corroborate the description? Are old pages or third-party profiles feeding obsolete facts?
Make the website eligible for ChatGPT search
OpenAI says websites should allow OAI-SearchBot if they want to be eligible for inclusion in ChatGPT search results. OpenAI also notes that placement is not guaranteed. That is the right framing: crawler access is an eligibility condition, not a ranking promise.
Why you need more than one run
Generative answers vary. A single appearance is not a stable ranking and a single omission is not proof of invisibility. Use the same buyer questions repeatedly and report the percentage of runs in which the business is mentioned, cited or recommended.
For the underlying methodology, read ChatGPT Visibility and How We Measure.