Yes — ChatGPT recommends local businesses by name, and whether it recommends yours is checkable in about ten minutes. There’s no dashboard for this and no ranking report to buy; the test is simply asking, the way a customer would, and reading the answer carefully.
The test, step by step
- Open a fresh chat. Memory and past conversations can color answers, so start clean — a logged-out session or a temporary chat is the honest vantage. You want the answer a stranger gets, not the answer you get.
- Ask like a customer, not like an owner. The service and the city in plain words: “who does mobile IV therapy in Killeen?”, “best home care agency in Waco?”, “recommend a detailer near Round Rock for a ceramic coating.” Not your business name — the point is to see who gets named when nobody asks about you specifically.
- Try at least three phrasings. Swap the service term, swap “best” for “recommend,” add a constraint a real customer would add. Assistants answer variations differently, and the pattern across phrasings tells you more than any single reply.
- Ask it why. A follow-up — “what are those recommendations based on?” — often surfaces the sources behind the answer. Note which surfaces come up.
- Repeat in Gemini. Different assistant, different reading of the same public record. Ten more minutes, and you have two vantage points instead of one.
How to read what comes back
You’re named. Check what it says next to your name — services, area, the details a customer would act on. An assistant recommending you with stale facts is sending people to a business that half-exists; the sources it reads are where corrections happen.
You’re absent. Absence usually means the public sources about you are thin or disagree with each other, and the assistant had stronger material for someone else. The likely causes, and what fixes each one, are diagnosable.
A competitor owns the answer. Read their public record — profile, reviews, directory presence — against yours. What the assistant saw in theirs and not in yours is the gap, stated for free.
What the test can’t tell you
It’s a reading, not a verdict. Answers shift between sessions and days, so a single absence proves little and a single mention guarantees nothing. What the test reliably shows is the state of your public record as an assistant reads it right now — which is exactly the thing you can work on.
Run it today, note what you find, and re-run it next quarter. The work between the two readings is what feeds the answer.
NASP 
Wild Foods Co. 
Noble Origins 
Cowboy Pools 
BT Biltong