New data just landed, and it’s rough: AI platforms recommend only 1.2% of business locations on ChatGPT, and 7.4% on Perplexity. Compare that to 35.9% visibility in Google’s local 3-pack and you can see the whole channel is broken for most owners. Reddit user u/Professional-Rest138 posted a test in r/PromptEngineering that shows exactly why, and gives a way to measure it instead of guessing.
The number that matters most: 45% of consumers used ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to find a local business in the past year. That’s up from 6% the year before. That’s not a trend, that’s a channel shift happening under most owners’ noses.
And the exercise is dead simple. Open an incognito tab, type “best [your service] in [your suburb]” the way a customer would, not the way you’d describe your own business. Do it before you read another word. Most owners never have.
Why this test breaks so many assumptions
Ranking well on Google tells you almost nothing about how AI systems see you. The share of Google AI citations coming from top-10 organic results dropped from about 76% to about 38% in under a year. That’s according to the data the original poster cited, and it means SEO rank alone won’t save you.
It gets worse from there. Only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity. Being strong on one platform and invisible on another is the norm, not the exception. That means testing a single AI tool tells you close to nothing about your actual visibility.
Fewer than half the brands leading traditional local search even show up in AI recommendations at all, per SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index. The gap between “ranks well” and “gets recommended” has never been wider.
Three ways to act on this
🔍 Run the full audit, not the one-off check. A single incognito query tells you if you show up today. It doesn’t tell you why, or what to fix. The original poster’s method turns the test into an actual system: 20 queries, three AI platforms, two tracked outcomes.
Here’s the prompt, reproduced exactly as posted:
I am auditing how AI systems talk about my business.
Name: [business]
Industry: [industry]
Location: [suburb, city]
Services: [list]
Main customer and their actual problem: [describe]
Competitors I genuinely lose deals to: [3-5]Generate 20 queries a real customer might type into an AI assistant looking for a business like mine. Spread across: general recommendations, problem-based phrased like a frustrated customer would ask, comparison and alternatives including my named competitors, specific service queries, local and near-me variations, and one long messy conversational one.
Use customer language, not industry terms. Do not include my business name in any query, I want to see if I come up on my own. For problem-based ones, describe the symptom rather than the solution.
Run those 20 queries across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. Track two separate outcomes for each: whether you were mentioned, and whether you were recommended. Getting named in passing while three competitors get the actual recommendation is not a win, and lumping the two together hides the real score.
📋 Log the sources, not just your own rank. The most useful column in the whole exercise isn’t your score, it’s the list of domains each AI cites as sources. Any domain that shows up repeatedly with no listing or mention of your business is your actual gap. That list is more actionable than anything else the audit produces.
🚫 Rule out the technical kill switch first. Check your robots.txt and any Cloudflare bot rules for OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot. Plenty of sites block these crawlers by accident through a default security setting. If you’re blocked, nothing else on this list matters until that’s fixed.
Tips and pitfalls
- Track mentioned versus recommended separately. They measure different things, and conflating them will make your numbers look better than reality.
- Test all three platforms every time. Skipping one because it’s “less popular” defeats the purpose, since only 11% of domains show up on both of the big two.
- Don’t skip the robots.txt check because it feels too basic. It’s the single most common cause of total invisibility, and it’s a five-minute fix once you know it’s the problem.
- Only 14% of marketers currently track any of this. The bar for getting ahead here is genuinely low right now. Owners who run this audit this month have a real window before it becomes standard practice.
Run your own incognito test today if you haven’t already, then build out the full 20-query audit this week. The original poster put the complete framework together in a resources library: query categories, tracking table, scoring, and source analysis. Worth digging into if you want the whole system instead of piecing it together yourself.
open an incognito tab and ask chatgpt for the best [what you do] in your city. most owners have never checked whether they come up, and the numbers are worse than you’d think
by u/Professional-Rest138 in PromptEngineering