AI Shortlist
Does ChatGPT recommend your business?
Your customers have started asking AI who to hire. Find out if you're the name it gives them.
No form yet? Email nick@growthboost.ai with the word SCAN, your business name, website and town.
The short answer: ChatGPT and other AI tools recommend a local business when they can find clear, consistent information about what it does, who it serves and where, both on its own website and in other places that mention it. If that information is missing or vague, the tool names someone else. You can check where you stand in about ten minutes, or get a free AI Shortlist scan from GrowthBoost.
The problem
A short list, not a page of links.
When someone searches Google, they get a page of links and pick for themselves. When they ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok or Perplexity "who should I hire for this in my town," they usually get a few names. Sometimes one.
If you're on that list, you get the call. If you're not, the buyer never sees you. They don't scroll past you. You just aren't there.
That's a revenue problem, not a marketing one. The jobs still get booked. They go to whoever got named.
Most owners have no idea which side of that line they're on, because nobody has asked.
Why AI skips some businesses
They name businesses they can describe with confidence.
AI tools don't pick at random, and they don't reward whoever spent the most on ads. They name businesses they can describe with confidence. Here's what usually gets in the way.
Your site reads like a brochure.
"We're passionate about quality." "Customer service is our priority." Lines like these don't answer a question. When a buyer asks who to hire for a specific job in a specific town, a page that never names the job or the town gives the tool nothing to go on.
The basics are hard to find.
What you do, who it's for, where you work, what it costs or how pricing works. If a person has to dig for it, a machine probably won't piece it together either.
Your details don't match across the web.
Different names, addresses, phone numbers or service lists on your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories you're listed in make it harder to tell that they're all you.
Nobody else talks about you.
AI tools lean on what other sources say, not only what you say about yourself. Reviews, local directories, news mentions and industry listings all count. If you aren't mentioned anywhere else, the tool has little to work with.
Your pages are hard for the tools to read.
Key information stuck in images, PDFs or pop-ups, or a site that blocks AI crawlers, can keep you out of answers.
None of this is about tricking a machine. It's the same information a good customer would want. It just has to be written down, in plain words, where it can be found.
Check it yourself
How to check what AI says about you.
You can do this yourself this week. It takes about ten minutes for a first look, and maybe an hour if you want a baseline you can measure against later.
1. Write down the questions a buyer would ask.
Aim for about ten. Word them the way a customer talks, not the way your website does. Include your town. For example: "Who should I hire for [what you do] in [your town]?" "Who's the best [what you do] near [your town] for [a common job]?" "What's a good [what you do] in [your town] that [a thing buyers care about, like 'offers weekend appointments']?"
2. Ask each question in more than one AI tool.
Use at least two or three: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and the AI answer at the top of Google if you see one. Different tools give different answers, and your customers don't all use the same one.
3. Write down who gets named, in what order.
Note whether you appear, which competitors appear, and anything the tool says about you that's wrong or out of date. A simple spreadsheet works: question, tool, names, notes.
4. Ask the same question a few ways.
Answers change from one ask to the next. One good or bad answer proves nothing. A pattern across many questions does.
5. Ask what the tool knows about you directly.
Try "What do you know about [your business name] in [your town]?" If it gets your services, location or hours wrong, that's a clue about where its information is coming from.
6. Look at the sources.
Where a tool shows the links it used, click them. That tells you which sites it trusts for your kind of question, and whether you're on them.
7. Save it and check again in 30 days.
Same questions, same tools. That's the only honest way to know whether anything you change makes a difference.
A couple of cautions. Results can differ if you're logged in, if the tool remembers past chats, or depending on where you're asking from. Try a fresh chat or a logged-out window when you can. And don't change anything on your site until you've written down where you stand. Without a baseline, you can't tell what worked.
If you'd rather have someone run it for you and tell you what it means, that's what the scan is for.
What the scan gives you
The AI Shortlist scan.
The AI Shortlist by GrowthBoost is a free scan of whether AI tools recommend your business when buyers ask who to hire.
The questions I asked.
25 buyer questions written for your business and your town, worded the way customers ask them.
Who got named.
For each question and each tool, which businesses came up, in what order, and whether you were one of them.
What the tools get wrong.
Anything an AI says about your business that's inaccurate, out of date or missing.
What I'd fix first.
A short list of the changes most likely to get you named, in order, in plain language. You get it as a private web page, sent to your email.
What it isn't: a sales pitch dressed up as a report, or a ranking guarantee. A tool sends each question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity through their APIs with web search on. I read every answer before you get the results.
How it works
1. You send three things.
Your business name, your website and your town, using the form below, or email nick@growthboost.ai with the word SCAN.
2. A tool writes the buyer questions.
Based on what you do and where, the way a customer would ask.
3. It runs them through the AI tools.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity, through their APIs with web search on.
4. You get the results.
With who got named and what I'd fix first.
5. You decide what's next.
Fix it yourself with the list, or talk to me about doing it together. There's no obligation either way.
Who's behind this
I'm Nick Turnbull. GrowthBoost is my one-person consultancy for owner-led businesses, based in Wheaton, Illinois. Before this I spent over a decade building and running sales and revenue operations at Pure Storage, Smokeball and Built In.
I don't sell software and I'm not tied to one AI company. Your customers use different tools, so I check all of them. What I care about is whether the next buyer who asks picks you.
Questions
Does ChatGPT recommend local businesses?
Yes. When someone asks ChatGPT who to hire for a job in a specific town, it often answers with a short list of named businesses. Other AI tools, including Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity, do the same. Which businesses get named depends on what the tool can find about each one and how clearly that information matches the question.
How do I find out if AI recommends my business?
Write down about ten questions a customer would ask, including your town, such as "Who should I hire for [service] in [town]?" Ask each one in two or three AI tools and record who gets named. Repeat a few times, since answers vary. GrowthBoost's free AI Shortlist scan runs these questions for you and reports the results.
Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my business?
Usually because it can't find clear, consistent information about what you do, who you serve and where. Common causes are a website written in general marketing language, missing service or location details, details that don't match across listings, and few mentions of the business on other sites such as reviews and directories.
Is getting recommended by AI the same as SEO?
They overlap but aren't the same. SEO aims to rank a page in a list of search results. Getting recommended by AI, sometimes called answer engine optimization or AEO, aims to be one of the few names an AI tool gives in its answer. Clear, specific, consistent information about your business helps with both.
What is the AI Shortlist scan?
The AI Shortlist by GrowthBoost is a free scan for owner-led businesses. It runs real buyer questions, like "who should I hire for this in my town," through ChatGPT and other AI tools. Nick Turnbull reviews every answer, then sends back who got named, what the tools get wrong, and what he'd fix first.
Which AI tools does the scan check?
The AI Shortlist scan is not tied to one AI company. It checks the tools customers use to ask for recommendations: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity, because different tools can name different businesses for the same question.
Get the scan
Find out if you're on the list.
Your next customer may already be asking AI who to hire. Find out whose name comes back.
Or email nick@growthboost.ai with the word SCAN, your business name, website and town. I'll take it from there.
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