Open ChatGPT and ask it to recommend a business like yours, in the city you work in.
Does your name come up? Or somebody else's?
Most business owners have never checked. And more and more of their customers are asking exactly that question, instead of scrolling through Google.
A recommendation is not a ranking
This is the shift most people miss.
Google sends you a visitor. They see ten results, click a few, and compare.
An AI assistant sends you a recommendation. It names two or three businesses, explains why, and that's often where the search ends. There's no second page in an answer. Whoever gets named takes nearly everything.
That makes being named by an assistant a different game from ranking on Google, even though the two are connected.
Here's the system
I built this for businesses, and I pointed it at my own website first. Here's what it does, every week:
→ It watches your whole market. What people in your city are searching for now. Not what they were searching for when your website was built.
→ It watches your competitors. What they're winning, what they stopped doing, and where they've gone quiet.
→ It finds what's broken or missing on your side, and fixes it. Missing pages, unclear service descriptions, no mention of the areas you cover, nothing that proves you've done the work. You need something to rank with.
→ It asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions a client would ask. "Who's the best [your trade] in [your city]?" "Who can help me with [problem]?" And it records whether your name came up, or somebody else's did.
→ It keeps every answer. So you can see the exact month you disappeared, instead of guessing.
→ And it runs again the following week on its own.
Why I tested it on myself first
Because if it didn't work, I'd rather find that out on my own site than on someone else's.
Today, if you search for what Brand Matrix does in the city I work in, it comes up on the first page, and the assistants have started naming it too. Neither of those was true when I started.
What actually helps you get named
AI assistants build their answers from what they can find and trust about you. The basics that make the biggest difference:
- Say clearly what you do, and where. A page per service, and the cities or regions you cover, in plain words. Assistants can't recommend you for something your website never says.
- Be consistent everywhere. Same business name, same description, same contact details on your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories.
- Answer real questions. Write about the questions customers actually ask you, the way you'd answer them on a call. Pages like that are what assistants quote.
- Show proof. Real reviews, real project examples, real names. Assistants lean towards businesses that others vouch for.
- Keep it fresh. A website that hasn't changed in two years looks like a business that hasn't either.
None of this is a trick. It's making it easy for a machine to understand what a good human visitor would understand: who you are, what you do, and why you're worth recommending.
The part nobody expects
Almost nobody is losing on purpose. They've simply never looked.
You can't fix what you don't measure, and right now most businesses have no idea whether AI assistants mention them at all. Just tracking it, week by week, puts you ahead of nearly every competitor in your area.
Try it now
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to recommend someone in your trade, in your city. Write down who they name.
When did you last check whether your name came up?
If you'd like this system running for your business, book a free call and I'll show you what the assistants currently say about you. Related: why visitors leave your website without enquiring.