How to Check If Your Business Shows Up in ChatGPT — A 5-Minute DIY Audit for Home Services Owners
Danny Tsui
TL;DR
- Type your business name into ChatGPT. Does it come up when someone asks "best [your service] in [your city]"? For most home services sites, no.
- I ran 60 AI queries on the 5 biggest HVAC companies in San Antonio earlier this month. They got cited in 15% of results combined. Two scored zero.
- The audit walkthrough is below. Five minutes, three free tools.
- llms.txt isn't the fix. Almost every AI SEO agency right now is selling it as the fix. I'll explain what actually moves the needle.
- Free 1-page audit at the bottom if you'd rather have me run it.
The 5-Minute Self-Check
Five minutes. Three browser tabs. No tools, no subscriptions.
Step 1 - ChatGPT
- Open chat.openai.com
- Turn the "Search" toggle on if you have it (free accounts have it now)
- Type the question a customer would actually ask. "Who are the best HVAC companies in San Antonio?" "Who installs mini splits near Castle Hills?"
- Read the answer. Note which businesses get named. Check the citations at the bottom.
Is your name in there? If yes, baseline visibility achieved. If no, click the citations and look at who is. That tells you where the authority lives in your market.
Step 2 - Perplexity
- Open perplexity.ai (no account needed)
- Run the same query
- Look at the cited sources on the right side
Perplexity is the easiest of the three. It always shows its sources. If it cited a Forbes Advisor list, a Yelp top 10 page, or a Reddit thread, you've just learned what surfaces matter in your industry.
Step 3 - Google AI Overviews
- Open Google in an incognito window so it doesn't personalize the results
- Run the same query
- Watch what (if anything) appears above the regular results
About 7% of local commercial queries trigger an AI Overview, per Ahrefs early-2026 data. Other estimates run higher. For HVAC and plumbing queries in San Antonio specifically, I've seen the trigger rate close to zero. Not a bug. AIO doesn't fire on every query, and for high-intent local searches Google still favors the Map Pack and paid ads.
When the AIO does trigger, read the citations. Those are the pages Google's AI treats as authoritative for that query.
What a healthy result looks like
One citation? You've got baseline visibility. Most home services sites in SA never get there.
Two or more? You're in rare air. Jon Wayne / Lowe's / Home Depot tier.
Zero? Same boat as almost every owner who reaches out to me.
What Most San Antonio Home Services Sites Actually Look Like
I ran this exact audit on the 5 biggest HVAC companies in San Antonio in early May 2026. 60 queries total. Four query types ("best HVAC SA," "AC repair SA," "emergency HVAC near me," "AC installation SA"), three AI surfaces, five brands.
Combined AI visibility came in at 15%. Out of 60 possible mentions, the group got cited 9 times.
The best performer (Jon Wayne) hit 33%. Two of the five tested — TemperaturePro and Honeycomb — scored a flat zero.
For the four commercial-intent queries I ran in Google AI Overviews, the AIO didn't trigger once. Map Pack and sponsored ads owned the page on every search.
Don't read that as "AI search is broken." Read it as an opening. The biggest brands in town aren't winning AI visibility either. The first home services owner in San Antonio who takes this seriously is going to take the citation pool.
Why Your Site Isn't Showing Up (The 4 Real Reasons)
I've run this audit on a few dozen home services sites in the last six months. The same four gaps keep coming back. Roughly in this order:
1. Authority gap
ChatGPT and Perplexity don't crawl your service-area page and decide you're the answer. They look at who's already been called an authority by someone else. Forbes Advisor lists. Yelp "10 best" articles. Regional news (KSAT, MySA). Trusted directories. If your business isn't on those, you're not in the citation pool. The single highest-leverage move you can make is landing on a Yelp "best HVAC in San Antonio" type page or a regional Forbes list.
2. Review depth
30 Google reviews vs your competitor's 800 isn't a small gap. AI treats it as the same kind of signal a buyer would treat it as. ChatGPT in particular is heavily review-weighted. One of the brands that scored zero in my test sits under 50 reviews. The one that scored 33% has over 2,000. Reviews aren't just a ranking signal anymore. They're a citation signal.
3. Content thinness
Most home services sites have five pages. Home, services, about, contact, plus a service-area page or two. That's not enough surface for AI to learn what you do, where you do it, who you serve, or why a customer should pick you. The sites that get cited consistently have neighborhood pages, FAQ-rich service pages, and some editorial content (blog or guide format) that answers actual customer questions.
4. Schema gap
Roughly 70% of small business websites have no structured data on them at all (per Schema App's 2026 SMB survey). For a home services business, that means missing LocalBusiness schema, FAQPage schema, Service schema. Without it, AI has to guess what your business does. Usually it doesn't try very hard.
You'll notice llms.txt isn't on this list.
The llms.txt Detour
Almost every AI SEO agency right now is selling llms.txt as the answer. Add the file, get found, done.
I shipped llms.txt to a San Antonio HVAC client earlier this year. Fully optimized file, all the right structured data. We watched their AI visibility for the next couple months. It didn't move. Brands in my baseline test that scored higher than this client had nothing remarkable going on with llms.txt either.
Here's what llms.txt actually is. A hygiene file, in the same family as robots.txt or sitemap.xml. It tells AI crawlers what's worth indexing on your site. Useful. Not transformative.
What's actually gating your visibility is the four items above. Authority. Reviews. Content depth. Schema. Anyone selling you "llms.txt installation" as a standalone service is either confused or pricing hygiene as transformation.
The Fixes (In Order of Impact)
Short version below. Full version lives in Will AI Replace SEO? 12 Months of Watching It Happen.
- Get on the lists that cite you. Yelp top 10s, Forbes Advisor regional rankings, "Best of San Antonio" guides. Outreach, pitches, earned media. One placement on a major list can take a zero-citation brand to 20-30% visibility, sometimes faster than you'd expect.
- Push reviews past 100. Build a real ask flow. Text after every job. QR code on the invoice. Train the techs to ask. Hit 100 first, then 300, then 500. ChatGPT weights review volume heavily and there's no shortcut.
- Service-area depth. Real pages for real San Antonio neighborhoods. Castle Hills, Alamo Heights, Stone Oak, Helotes, Boerne. Each with local detail, photos, FAQ specific to the area. A generic "Service Areas" page does almost nothing.
- LocalBusiness, FAQPage, and Service schema. One-time work, permanent payoff. FAQPage in particular is what AI pulls as a direct answer chunk.
- Local press. One KSAT or MySA mention beats fifty directory listings. Story angles that actually work: founder profile, community sponsorship, technical innovation (a new install type, new equipment line), seasonal explainer (storm prep, summer load).
- Google Business Profile. Still load-bearing. AI Overviews pull heavily from GBP data, photos, posts, reviews. Most home services GBPs I audit are running at 30% completeness, at best.
Stack all six over six months and 0% becomes 30%+ visibility. I've watched the curve play out more than once.
FAQ
How do I check if my business shows up on ChatGPT?
Run a 5-minute audit with three free tools — ChatGPT (with search on), Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Ask the question a customer would: "best [your service] in [your city]." Look at whether your business gets named, and read the cited sources. ByteSimple also runs a free 1-page audit if you'd rather skip the manual part.
Why isn't my website showing up in ChatGPT?
Four common reasons. You're not cited on Forbes lists, Yelp top-10s, or local news. You have fewer than 100 reviews. Your site is thin (under 10 real pages). Or you're missing structured data. Adding llms.txt isn't going to fix any of these, despite what most agencies are selling.
What's the difference between ChatGPT visibility and Google SEO?
Google ranks pages on a results list. ChatGPT names businesses inside a synthesized answer. Same fundamentals matter — authority, reviews, content depth — but ChatGPT weights brand mentions, citations, and schema higher than backlinks. A page ranking #8 in Google can still get cited if it answers the question well.
Does adding llms.txt actually help me rank in ChatGPT?
Not on its own. llms.txt is hygiene, the same family as robots.txt. It tells crawlers what to index. It doesn't cause AI to cite your business. I tested this on a San Antonio HVAC client. We shipped a fully optimized file. Visibility didn't move. Don't pay an agency for "llms.txt installation" as a standalone deliverable.
How long until my business starts showing up in AI search?
Depends on the move. A timely news story Bing indexes can surface in AI Overviews within hours. Steady SMB website visibility growth takes 3-6 months. Building the review volume and citation backlog needed to get consistently named by ChatGPT, 6-12 months. Anyone selling "AI visibility in 4 hours" for a small home services site is overselling.
Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me?
Usually one of four things. Their review count is higher than yours. They're cited on a list you're not (Forbes, Yelp top-10). Their site has more depth. Or their brand has more total web mentions overall. Run the audit and look at the cited sources. That's where the answer hides.
Can I pay ChatGPT to recommend my business?
No, not as of May 2026. There's no "sponsored result" inside the answer the way Google Ads sit on top of regular results. OpenAI has hinted at shopping placements coming, but right now AI visibility is fully earned. That's actually a real opening for any business willing to put the work in.
Want Me to Run the Audit for You?
If you'd rather skip the DIY and get a clean 1-page report, I'll do it manually for free.
Here's what you get:
- Screenshots from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot for your business
- A breakdown of where AI is pulling its answers from in your market
- The 3 highest-impact fixes for your specific gaps, ranked
It's not a tool. I run it by hand. PDF back in 48 hours. No signup spam, no upsell sequence.
