What ChatGPT Says About Your Business: a 10-Minute Check

“Recommend a good car repair shop in Obolon.” “Where in Zhytomyr can I buy a kids’ bike with delivery?” More and more often, people ask questions like these not in Google Search but in ChatGPT, Gemini or the AI Overview in Google itself. The answer arrives ready-made: three to five names, addresses, opening hours, sometimes prices. The person may never visit a website at all.

That leaves a business owner with two questions. Are you in that answer? And if you are, does it say correctly where you are, until what time you are open and how much the service costs? Below: what we know about how people use AI assistants, how to check yourself in 10 minutes, where AI gets data about you, and what to do so the data matches everywhere.

1. People already ask AI to “recommend”

The freshest figures from a named study that we found are from the US. According to BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, 45% of US consumers used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool to find a local business. We did not find a Ukrainian study with a stated methodology. Figures such as “77% of Ukrainians use AI when shopping” circulate online, but without the name of a study, so we do not quote them.

It is important not to overestimate the scale. According to Ahrefs data for September 2026 (115,000 websites), visits from ChatGPT are about 0.34% of tracked website traffic, from all AI assistants together about 0.43%, and from Google about 24%. So Google has not gone anywhere. But an AI assistant often answers instead of your website: the person sees the address and hours right in the answer and does not click further. If there is a mistake, your website statistics will not tell you.

Are these visitors more valuable? Here the sources disagree, and we will show both sides. In June 2025 Ahrefs wrote about its own website: visitors from AI search were 0.5% of traffic but 12.1% of sign-ups, which means they converted roughly 23 times better than regular search results. In September 2025 the agency Amsive compared 54 websites using six months of GA4 data: the conversion rate from AI assistants was 4.87%, from free search results 4.60%, and the difference was not statistically significant. The first is one website, the second is a larger sample. Our conclusion is cautious: an AI assistant is not a magic channel, just one more place where customers should find you without mistakes.

2. How to check yourself in 10 minutes

You need a phone or a computer and 10 minutes. Nothing to install.

1. Open ChatGPT in a window without signing in (your browser’s incognito mode). This way the assistant does not tailor its answer to your history: if your account has asked about your company a hundred times, it may “remember” it, while a customer’s will not.
2. Turn on search. For a long time this was a Search button with a globe icon under the input field. In newer versions search may be hidden in the “+” menu or turn on by itself when the question is about current information. The sign that search worked: there are links to sources under the answer.
3. Write the way a customer writes: “recommend” plus your niche and city, for example “recommend a tyre shop in Vinnytsia”. Add two more variants: with a district (“…in Vyshenka”) and with a condition (“…open on Sunday”). Do not type your own name: the customer does not know it yet.
4. Repeat in Gemini (gemini.google.com) and in Google Search. In Google, the AI answer appears at the top of the page as an AI Overview; in Ukraine AI Overviews have been available since May 2025. According to the data below, Gemini relies on Google Maps, so its answer shows what Google sees in your listing.
5. Write down the result in a simple table: assistant, query, whether you are there, in what position, what is said about you, address, phone, hours, prices, which websites it was taken from.

An important caveat about “without signing in”. OpenAI opened free search in ChatGPT to all signed-in users in December 2024, and to users who are not signed in in February 2025. However, OpenAI’s help article about the ChatGPT home page says the signed-out experience is not yet available for users in Europe, except for users in the UK. We could not confirm whether OpenAI counts Ukraine as Europe for this rule. If ChatGPT does not let you in without signing in, sign in to your free account and open a Temporary Chat: it does not use your history or memory.

Separately, ask the assistant about yourself by name: “what kind of company is [name] in [city], what are its hours, how much does [service] cost”. What to do when AI confidently makes up your prices or schedule, we covered in the article “How AI hallucinates: what it can make up about your business”. Here we focus on something else: whether you are recommended at all and whether your data matches.

3. Where AI gets data about you

An AI assistant has no knowledge of its own about your business. It builds the answer from what it finds online and stitches several sources into one.

• Your website. In a BrightLocal study (December 2024, 800 searches in ChatGPT, 20 niches in US cities), 58% of the sources in answers about local businesses were the companies’ own websites, 27% were mentions on third-party websites, and 15% were directories.
• Google Maps, social media, directories. According to SOCi’s Local Visibility Index (January 2026, more than 350,000 locations of multi-location brands in the US), for local queries AI relies most often on Google Maps, company websites, Yelp and Facebook.
• Reviews. SOCi also writes that ChatGPT recommends businesses with an average rating of about 4.3 stars. Reviews work as an entry ticket: with a low rating you may simply not make it into the recommendation. How “perfect” ratings look to people, we wrote in the article “A 5.0 rating looks fake”.

Now the main point. According to the same SOCi index, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other non-Google assistants give correct business contact details only about 68% of the time. Gemini, which relies on Google Maps, is noticeably more accurate. The reason is simple: when your website shows one phone number, your Google listing a second and Instagram a third, the assistant picks one at random or mixes them up. Ukrainian practitioners say the same: differences in descriptions, prices and photos between your website, marketplaces and social media reduce the model’s trust in the data.

Both studies are American and cover multi-location brands, so exact percentages for small businesses cannot be derived from them. But the mechanism is the same: AI trusts what is repeated identically in several places.

4. What to do so the data matches

1. Create a reference sheet. One table: exact name, address, phone, opening hours (including holidays), website, price range for your main services. Compare everything else against it.
2. Website. Your Contact page should be text, not an image: an assistant reads images worse. Prices go on a separate page or in the service description, also as text, not only in a PDF. An old address after a move must not remain on the website or in the page footer.
3. Google Business Profile (your listing on Maps). Find your business in Google Search, select “Edit profile”, correct the details and select “Save”. For holidays, set special hours so that it does not say “open” when you are closed. What else to check in your listing, we described in the article “Your Google Maps listing: 6 things to check”.
4. Social media. Your Instagram bio, Facebook page, Telegram channel: the same address, the same phone, the same hours.
5. Marketplaces and directories. Prom, Rozetka, city directories, review aggregators. Often there is a listing filled in several years ago, and sometimes not by you.
6. Bing. At the end of 2024, BrightLocal researchers advised tidying up your presence in Bing too, because ChatGPT search relied on it at the time. OpenAI does not disclose in detail how ChatGPT searches now, so this is a secondary step, not a mandatory one.
7. Repeat the check once a month. Corrections do not show up in AI answers instantly: assistants update at different speeds.

From our practice

During advertising audits, these are the first things we compare: the phone number in the ad, on the website and in the Google listing; opening hours; the address after a move. A mismatch here hurts twice: a customer who came from an ad calls the wrong number or drives to the old address, and an AI assistant, if asked, repeats the same confusion.

Two traps worth knowing about. The first: promises of “exact query volumes in ChatGPT”. There are no reliable tools for this, because OpenAI does not publish query statistics. The second: guarantees like “we will get you into AI answers”. We do not know any method that guarantees it, and we say so honestly. What you can control is that all sources say the same thing about you.

And do not confuse visibility in AI with advertising. If AI does not mention you, it does not mean your ads are bad, and vice versa. These are different channels, and we wrote about why you should not keep all your leads in one of them in the article “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.

Summary

1. People already ask AI to recommend a business in their city. There are still few visits to websites from there, but the answer often replaces the website itself.
2. Check yourself: ChatGPT with search without signing in (or a Temporary Chat), Gemini and the AI Overview in Google, the query “recommend” plus your niche and city.
3. See whether you are in the answer and whether the address, prices and hours are correct.
4. AI collects data from your website, Google Maps, social media and directories. Make sure everything is identical everywhere, and repeat the check once a month.

You can read how we run campaigns for local businesses in the local business advertising section.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will look at your account, compare the phone, address and hours in your ads, on your website and in your Google listing, and tell you what is worth fixing.