ChatGPT Ads in India: How Businesses Can Advertise on ChatGPT
ChatGPT Ads in India are now available. Learn how ChatGPT advertising works, how to set up campaigns, costs, targeting and what businesses need to know.
A potential customer asks ChatGPT to recommend a product, supplier or local service. It gives them three businesses to consider.
Is yours one of them?
That is becoming an important question for businesses as people use ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI search and other AI tools to research options before they buy.
The good news is that you can check.
In this guide, we will show you how to check if your brand appears in ChatGPT, Gemini and AI search, what questions to test, what to record and what to look at if your competitors keep appearing while you do not.
If you are new to the subject, start with our guide to what AI search visibility is and how to measure it.
What does it actually mean to appear in AI search?
There are a few different ways your business can appear.
Brand recognition: AI knows who your business is and can explain what you do when someone asks about you directly.
Brand mention: Your business appears in an answer about a relevant product, service or subject.
Citation: An AI answer uses a page from your website as one of its sources.
Recommendation: Your business is actively suggested as an option for someone considering a purchase or service.
There is an important difference between these.
If you ask ChatGPT, “What does [your business name] do?” and it answers correctly, that tells you the platform knows something about your company.
But a potential customer who has never heard of you is unlikely to search that way.
The more valuable question is whether your business appears when people ask about the problem you solve, the category you operate in or the options they should consider.
Start with the questions your customers might actually ask
Before checking ChatGPT or Gemini, think about what someone might ask before choosing a business like yours.
Do not test only your company name.
Build a small list covering different stages of the buying decision.
For example, a UK business could test questions such as:
- Problem-based
What is the best way to reduce condensation in a bedroom?
- Category-based
What is the best accounting software for a small UK business?
- Recommendation
Which independent mattress brands are worth considering in the UK?
- Local
Who are some good family solicitors in Bristol?
- Comparison
What are the best alternatives to [well-known competitor]?
- Purchase consideration
What type of home security system is best for a three-bedroom house?
The aim is to find out whether someone who does not already know your brand has a realistic chance of discovering it through AI.
Start with around 10 to 20 questions that genuinely matter to your business.
How to check if your brand appears in ChatGPT, Gemini and AI search
Once you have your questions, test the same set across the platforms most relevant to your customers.
You could start with:
- ChatGPT
- Google Gemini
- Perplexity
- Google AI search experiences
Run each question and look beyond whether your company name appears.
Was your brand mentioned?
If yes, look at the context. Was the business simply listed, or was it described as a relevant option?
Was your business recommended?
A recommendation is more commercially useful than a passing mention.
Was your website cited?
If AI uses your website as a source, note which page it selected.
Which competitors appeared?
Sometimes the most useful information is not that you are missing, but seeing which businesses appear instead.
Is the information accurate?
Check your services, locations, products and other details. Outdated or incorrect information is worth identifying even when the brand appears.
What does AI associate your business with?
You may find that AI understands one part of your company very well but barely connects you with another important service or product.
Do not judge your visibility based on a single response. AI-generated answers can vary, so consistent checking is more useful than one screenshot.
Keep a simple record of what you find
You do not need a complicated dashboard to start.
A spreadsheet can include these columns:
- Prompt
- Best family-friendly hotels in Cornwall
- Platform
- ChatGPT
- Brand mentioned?
- Yes / No
- Recommended?
- Yes / No
- Website cited?
- Yes / No
- Competitors appearing
- Brand A, Brand B
- Information accurate?
- Yes / No
- Date checked
- Monthly check
Keep the same core questions and repeat the test regularly.
Over time, patterns become much more useful than individual results.
You might discover that your educational content is regularly cited, but your business is rarely recommended commercially. Or you might be visible on one AI platform but almost absent from another.
That gives you something specific to investigate.
In one of our AI search projects for a Croydon wellness business, we kept a consistent set of 200 monitored prompts. Over 12 months, the brand’s visibility across that prompt set grew from 7.4% to 31%, while the number of prompts returning the client’s own content as a source increased from 5 to 62.
- Visibility across the 200 monitored prompts7.4%31%
- Prompts returning the client's own content as a source562
You can see the full approach in our AI Search Visibility for a Croydon Wellness Brand case study.
Can AI visibility checker tools help?
Yes. Manual checking is useful because you control the questions and can make them specific to your customers.
Third-party tools can provide another view.
The Ahrefs AI Visibility Checker can help you check where a brand appears across AI platforms and identify topics and sources connected with that visibility.
The Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker can also provide a broader view of AI mentions, cited pages and the topics associated with a brand.
These tools can be useful for broader checks, but they should not be treated as a perfect record of every AI answer every customer sees.
Your own prompt set still matters because it reflects the questions that are commercially important to your business.
What if your competitors appear and you do not?
This is where the check becomes useful.
Simply knowing that you are missing does not solve anything. The next job is understanding why.
- Does your website say clearly what you do?Products, services, locations and expertise should be easy for people and search systems to understand.
- Does your content answer real questions?If customers ask something and your site has nothing useful on it, there is little for an AI system to cite.
- Do other sources connect you to the subject?Reviews, publications, directories, case studies and credible third-party mentions all count.
- Are the technical foundations in place?Structure, internal linking, crawlability and relevant schema markup.
- Is there enough evidence to recommend you?Being understood and being recommended are not the same thing.
Check whether your website clearly explains what you do
Your main products, services, locations and areas of expertise should be easy for both people and search systems to understand.
Poor website structure, thin service pages or important information buried across unrelated pages can make this harder.
Look at the questions your content answers
If customers regularly ask a question but your website has nothing useful about it, there is little for an AI system to discover, understand or cite.
Our guide to how to build content AI actually understands goes deeper into structuring useful content around real customer questions.
Look beyond your own website
What other sources connect your brand with the subject?
Reviews, industry publications, directories, case studies, community discussions and credible third-party mentions all contribute to the wider information available about a business.
Read Why Brand Mentions Matter More Than Backlinks to understand why the context around those mentions matters.
Review your technical foundations
Website structure, internal linking, crawlability and relevant schema markup can make it easier for search systems to understand relationships between your business, services, locations and content.
Ask whether there is enough evidence to recommend you
Being understood and being recommended are not the same thing.
AI systems need enough useful information and supporting signals to confidently include a business when someone asks for options.
Our guide to how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT covers this in more detail.
We have seen the value of building these foundations with iAudit Global too. Its wider organic strategy included structured website pages and search-led content, and the visibility tracked later included thousands of AI citations.
You can read the full iAudit Global organic growth case study to see how search-led content, website structure and wider authority worked together.
Checking once is not enough
Think of your first check as a baseline.
Keep a core group of questions that matter to your business and revisit them monthly. Look for changes in mentions, citations, recommendations, competitor visibility and accuracy.
You can then connect those manual checks with the wider measurement methods covered in our guide to measuring AI search visibility.
The aim is not to chase every change in an AI answer.
It is to understand whether your business is becoming easier to find for the questions that could genuinely lead to a customer.
What if your brand is not showing up?
Checking your brand is the easy part.
Working out why competitors appear instead, what is missing from your digital presence and what needs to change takes a wider view.
At Maximus Mediascape, we look at the complete picture, including search visibility, website structure, content, schema, technical SEO, brand mentions and the signals that help search engines and AI platforms understand what a business should be known for.
If you have tested your brand and you are not appearing where you expected, tell us what you want to be found for.
Contact Maximus Mediascape and we can look at where your business is visible now, where the gaps are and what needs to happen next.
Related guides: What Is AI Search Visibility and How Do You Measure It?, How to Build Content AI Actually Understands, How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT, Why Brand Mentions Matter More Than Backlinks.
