How to tell whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity recommends your business (and what to do if you don't appear)

To find out whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity recommends your business, asking them once is not enough: every month you need to ask them the same list of 20-30 questions your customers would ask, under similar conditions, and record in a spreadsheet whether you appear, in what position, alongside whom and which sources they cite. That, together with the visits these assistants send you as recorded in Google Analytics 4, tells you, without paying for any tool, whether you really are showing up in ChatGPT and the rest.

If you don't appear, it is almost never because you are missing some trick: it is usually down to messy business details, too few reviews, nobody else talking about you, a confusing website or crawlers blocked without you knowing. Here is how to measure it and where to start.

Why AI recommendations already matter for your business

Using these tools in Spain is no longer something only a handful of curious early adopters do. According to the INE's 2025 Survey on ICT Use in Households, 37.9% of people aged 16 to 74 had used a generative artificial intelligence tool in the previous three months, and among 16- to 24-year-olds the figure reached 75.6%. The INE does not break this figure down by region in its press release, so we cannot give you a specific figure for the Canary Islands.

What Spanish data does not tell us is how many of those people use AI to choose a restaurant, a dentist or an estate agent. The most widely cited reference comes from the United States: in BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, carried out among 1,002 US adults, 45% said they used ChatGPT or other AI tools to ask for recommendations for local businesses, compared with 6% the previous year. Google was still the most widely used place to read business reviews, although it fell from 83% to 71%. It is a different market, but it shows where the habit is heading.

For a business in Tenerife that works with tourists there is a further nuance: those customers usually plan their trip from home and in their own language. If they ask in English or German about a restaurant in Los Cristianos or bike hire in Puerto de la Cruz, the assistant's answer is, in practice, your first shop window.

Where ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity get their local information

None of these assistants “knows” your business by heart: when the question is local, they go out and search, and whatever they find is what ends up in the answer.

That is why there is no single “AI ranking”: you might appear in Gemini thanks to your Google Business Profile and not appear in Perplexity because none of the websites it cites mentions you.

Training crawlers and search crawlers are not the same thing

Each company uses several bots with different jobs, and blocking one does not block the others. Here is a summary of their documentation as of October 2026:

The sources are OpenAI's crawler documentation, Google's list of common crawlers, Perplexity's bot guide and the Anthropic page cited above. OpenAI adds a useful detail: after you change your robots.txt, its systems can take around 24 hours to adjust.

Be careful with Google-Extended. It has no influence on Search, whose AI features (AI Overviews and AI Mode) use indexed pages that are eligible to be shown with a snippet, according to Google's documentation on AI features. But if you block it, your content will not be used for grounding in the Gemini apps, which is exactly where you want to appear.

How to measure, step by step, whether you appear in ChatGPT and other assistants

For a local business, a spreadsheet and one hour a month are enough. What matters is that the method is always the same, so that you can compare one month with another.

Step 1: write 20 to 30 questions the way your customers would ask them

Don't just ask about your own name: that only tells you whether the assistant knows you, not whether it recommends you. Above all, ask like someone who doesn't yet know you exist, spreading the questions across different types of intent. Here is an example with a fictitious dental clinic in La Laguna:

Draw them from what people ask you on the phone and on WhatsApp, from Search Console and from Google's autocomplete. Once they are written, don't change them; add any new ones separately.

Step 2: run the questions under comparable conditions

1. Always use the same assistants: at least ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. If your customers are businesses, add Copilot or Claude.
2. Ask while logged out or with a test account that has no history or memory: your personal account already “knows” things about you and skews the result.
3. Include the town in the question: ChatGPT uses an approximate location based on your IP, and “near me” changes depending on where you are asking from.
4. Repeat each question two or three times in new conversations: what matters is how often you appear, not a single run.
5. Do it in the same week of each month and, if possible, have the same person do it.

Step 3: what to record in the spreadsheet

One row per answer, with these columns:

The sources column is the most revealing. If Perplexity cites the same directory, the same local guide or the same press article again and again, that is where your business needs to be well represented.

Step 4: how to read the results each month

The main indicator is the mention rate: the answers in which you appear divided by the total number of answers. A hypothetical example: suppose you run 25 questions in three assistants, once each. That makes 75 answers; if you appear in 9, your rate is 12%. If after three months you are in 18 of the 75, you have gone up to 24%.

Look at it by assistant and by type of question, too. If you appear when people ask for your name but not when they ask about the service in your area, the assistants know you but don't yet associate you with what you sell.

How to see traffic from ChatGPT and other assistants in GA4

The spreadsheet measures whether you get named. Google Analytics 4 measures whether those mentions turn into visits. OpenAI explains in its FAQ for publishers that ChatGPT adds the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter to referral links, so those visits can be identified. Not every visit from an assistant arrives labelled, though: if someone copies your name and searches for it on Google later, or opens the link from an app that doesn't pass on where the visit came from, it will count as organic search or direct traffic.

For a quick look, go to Reports, Acquisition, Traffic acquisition, change the dimension to “Session source / medium” and look for chatgpt, perplexity, gemini, copilot or claude. To have it permanently, create a channel of your own:

1. In Admin, under Data display, open Channel groups and click Create new channel group, which starts from a copy of the default group.
2. Add a channel called, for example, “AI assistants”, with the condition “Source” “matches regex”.
3. Use a simple expression such as chatgpt|openai|perplexity|gemini|copilot|claude (Google's help suggests a longer one that you can copy).
4. Place that channel above “Referral”. Otherwise GA4 will classify those visits as ordinary referrals first.
5. In the acquisition reports, choose your new channel group as the dimension.

That is how the Google Analytics help page on custom channel groups explains it, and it includes an example for AI assistants. Bear in mind that a standard property only lets you create two custom groups.

For the Google side there is another source: Search Console's generative AI performance report, which Google began rolling out gradually on 31 August 2026. Not all properties have it yet, and it only appears if your site has built up enough impressions. It shows how many times links to your site were displayed in AI Overviews and AI Mode, although only impressions, not clicks.

And don't forget the simplest option: if you ask “How did you hear about us?” on your form or when you answer the phone, add “ChatGPT or another AI” as an option. It is imperfect, but it picks up customers that GA4 will never attribute to you.

What influences whether an assistant recommends you

None of these companies publishes its formula. What is documented is where they get their data, and from that you can work out what to look after. It is what we check first when a local business asks us about its visibility in AI.

Consistent business details everywhere

Your name, address, phone number, opening hours and services must match on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social media and directories. Google warns on its page about local ranking that if your business information isn't accurate, your profile may not appear in relevant searches in your area, and Gemini draws on that same Maps data. Start by choosing the right Google Business Profile categories, because they are what tell Google what you are.

Reviews: how many and what they say

On that same page, Google acknowledges that the number of reviews and the ratings influence local ranking. In the assistants, reviews also provide text: if your customers write “they see emergencies on Saturdays” or “they speak English”, that phrase may be exactly what connects your business with a specific question.

Other websites talking about you

Perplexity shows its sources and ChatGPT searches through external providers. If your business only exists on your own website, your chances are slim. Check in your spreadsheet which sources are cited for your questions and work on those: directories in your sector, professional bodies, tourist guides, local press, local business associations in your town.

A clear website that can be cited

One page per service that says in the first paragraph what you do, where and for whom; opening hours and service area in text (not just in an image); price ranges if you can give them; and direct answers to the questions people ask you. Google's guide to its generative AI features stresses original, useful content and advises against rewriting your website “for AI” or chasing artificial mentions. We explain this in more detail in what GEO is and how to appear in ChatGPT.

Letting search crawlers in

Open yourwebsite.com/robots.txt and check that you are not blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot. If your website runs through Cloudflare, check its settings as well: since 1 July 2025, Cloudflare asks every new domain whether it wants to allow AI crawlers and blocks those without permission by default. It is easy to overlook.

If you don't want your content used to train models but do want to appear in searches, you can treat the two cases separately. Here is an example robots.txt that reflects that decision:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

It is a business decision. For most local SMEs, the website is more of a shop window than an asset to protect.

A 90-day plan to improve your visibility in AI

This is the order we suggest to a local business starting from scratch. The owner can do almost all of it.

A checklist so that you don't miss anything:

• Monthly measurement with the same list of questions and a clean session.
• An “AI assistants” channel in GA4, placed above Referral.
• robots.txt and Cloudflare checked: search crawlers allowed.
• A complete Google Business Profile, with categories, opening hours, photos and replies to reviews.
• The same contact details on your website, social media and directories.
• One page per service with a direct answer in the first paragraph.
• A “ChatGPT or another AI” option under “How did you hear about us?”.

Much of this work overlaps with classic local SEO; if you want to go deeper into those foundations, take a look at our guide to local SEO in Tenerife.

Limitations: what can be measured and what cannot be promised

It is worth being honest about what this method can deliver. Answers change from one query to the next and depend on location, language, whether the user is logged in and what the assistant remembers from previous conversations. Your spreadsheet measures a sample, not “the truth”, which is why the trend over several months matters more than the figure for any single month.

Nor is there a stable ranking as there is on Google. There is no “position 3 in ChatGPT” for you to defend, and the companies update their models and sources without warning. Be wary of anyone who guarantees that AI will recommend you or promises results within weeks: what can be committed to is the work and the measurement, not the answer of a system that nobody controls from the outside.

And don't put it ahead of the basics: almost everything that helps you in the assistants also helps you in Google Maps and in normal search.

Next steps to find out where you stand and improve

This week: write your questions, do the first round in the three assistants and check your robots.txt. Next month, repeat the measurement and compare. With two or three months of data you will know whether you are heading in the right direction and which assistants or types of question you are still missing from.

If you would rather we set it up with you or review your results, at TeideSEO we work on visibility in AI assistants through our GEO service in Tenerife, always combined with the local SEO that underpins it.