What Is ChatGPT? The AI Tool That Recommends Businesses

ChatGPT is the AI assistant built by OpenAI, and it’s become one of the fastest-adopted technology products in history. Hundreds of millions of people use it for everything from writing emails to planning vacations, and increasingly, for finding and choosing businesses. Someone asks “best Italian restaurant in Austin with outdoor seating” and gets back a short list of names with explanations for each pick. That’s a customer making a buying decision, and ChatGPT is shaping it.

What makes ChatGPT relevant for business owners is that its recommendations carry real weight. When someone gets a list of ten links from Google, they browse and compare. When ChatGPT names three businesses and explains why each one is worth considering, most people just pick from that list. We tracked this dynamic across seven industries and six cities and found that a small number of businesses captured the vast majority of ChatGPT mentions per category, while dozens of qualified competitors never came up at all.

We also found that ChatGPT and Google AI regularly give completely different answers to the same question. Being recommended by one platform doesn’t guarantee anything on the other, which is why monitoring AI visibility across all platforms matters.

ChatGPT can search the web in real time before answering (RAG), which means a business that improves its online presence today can start showing up in recommendations relatively quickly. The model combines what it finds online with patterns from its training data to generate its answer. This makes the quality and breadth of a business’s online presence directly relevant to whether ChatGPT recommends it.

A quick check takes about five minutes: open ChatGPT, ask the kinds of questions a potential customer would ask, and see whether the business shows up. The answer is often surprising, and it’s the starting point for generative engine optimization.