Whether AI assistants name your Nepali business, and how to check

You can find out whether ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity name your business in about thirty minutes, for free, without buying a tool or hiring anybody. It is worth doing before you pay for any service that promises to improve it, because it is the only way to know whether the service did anything.

Most businesses in Nepal have never checked. Most agencies selling AI visibility in Nepal have never shown a client the before-and-after either, which is a related problem.

The test

Open a notebook or a spreadsheet. You need three columns: the query, which assistant you asked, and which businesses it named.

Write twenty questions a real customer would ask. Not the questions you wish they asked. If you run a guesthouse in Pokhara, that is "where should I stay in Pokhara near the lake", "cheap clean guesthouse Pokhara Lakeside", "family guesthouse Pokhara with parking". If you run a trekking company, "who should I book Annapurna Base Camp with", "reliable trekking agency Kathmandu". If you run a dental clinic in Kathmandu, "good dentist in Kathmandu", "dental implant Kathmandu cost".

Mix them. Some with your city, some with a neighbourhood, some with a specific service, some phrased as a plain question rather than keywords.

Run all twenty through four assistants. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's own AI Overviews — the answer block that appears above normal search results. That is eighty answers. It goes faster than it sounds.

Log every business named. Not just whether you appeared. Write down everyone who did, because that list is the actual competitive set, and it is usually not the list you expected.

Do not sign in, or use a private window. An assistant that knows your history will happily name your own business back to you, which tells you nothing.

Reading the result

There are four outcomes and they mean different things.

Named, described correctly. You are in good shape. Note which queries triggered it — usually the specific ones, rarely the broad ones.

Not named at all. The common result, and not a catastrophe. It means the assistants have nothing confident to say about you, which is a supply problem you can fix.

Named, described wrongly. Worse than absent, and more urgent. Wrong location, wrong prices, hours that closed two years ago, a service you stopped offering. Somewhere out there a stale source is being treated as true, and it is usually an old directory listing or an abandoned profile.

Not named, but your competitors are. The most useful outcome, because it gives you a list to study. Look at what those businesses have that you do not. Usually it is not a better website. Usually it is more reviews, in English, on Google, mentioning specific things.

Why Nepali businesses fail this more often

Assistants name businesses they can describe confidently from sources that agree with each other. Several things about operating in Nepal make that harder, and none of them are your fault.

Your name has more than one spelling. This is the big one, and it is nearly invisible from the inside. A business might appear as "Newa Lahana" in one place and "Newa: Lahana" in another. Signage is in Devanagari, the Facebook page uses one romanisation, the Google profile uses a slightly different one, and a tourism directory has invented a third. Family names carry the same problem — Shrestha and Shreshtha, Aryal and Ariyal.

To you these are obviously the same business. To a machine trying to work out whether three mentions describe one entity or three, they are evidence of uncertainty, and uncertainty is what stops you being named.

Pick one spelling. Use it exactly, everywhere, including the space and the punctuation.

Your address is a landmark, not a street. Most of Nepal runs on "near Bhatbhateni, Lazimpat" rather than a house number, because that is genuinely how people find things. Google supports pinning your location on the map directly, and you should — but every listing that describes your location differently in words adds another version of where you are. Write the address once, in one form, and reuse that exact string.

Almost everything about you is in Nepali, or on signage, or in someone's head. An assistant answering an English question needs English source material. If the only detailed description of your business exists on a signboard in Devanagari, there is nothing to quote. This is not a reason to drop Nepali. It is a reason to make sure one clear English description exists somewhere crawlable.

Your web presence is a Facebook page. Extremely common here, and understandable — it is free and everybody is already there. But it is close to invisible to the things you are being tested on. If you fix only one thing, make it a complete Google Business Profile, which is also free.

Your reviews are on the wrong platform. Nepali hospitality and trekking businesses often have years of reviews on TripAdvisor or Facebook and almost none on Google. Those reviews are real evidence and they do count for something. But Google reviews are the ones that feed the profile that both Google and the assistants lean on hardest.

What to fix first, in order

1. One spelling of your name, everywhere. Free. Takes an afternoon of finding every listing that exists.
2. A complete Google Business Profile with the right primary category, every service listed in the words customers use, and real photos.
3. One clear English description of what you do, where you are, and who you are for — on your profile at minimum, on a website if you have one.
4. Ask customers for Google reviews specifically. Foreign customers especially, because they write in English and mention specifics.
5. Find and correct the stale listings that the wrong-description result pointed at.

None of that requires an agency, and if an agency is worth paying, this is the floor it should start from rather than the service it sells you.

On the numbers you will see quoted

While researching this you will run into confident statistics: a specific percentage of Nepali businesses that have optimised for AI, a specific share of some company's bookings that now come from AI recommendations. Treat them carefully. Ask who measured it, over what period, and with what method. Most of these figures have no source attached, and a number with no method behind it is a marketing device, not evidence.

That includes anything on this site. The test above is written out in full precisely so you do not have to take anyone's word for the result — you can run it yourself and see your own numbers.

What to expect after you fix things

Slowly. Assistants do not re-read the web on a schedule you control, and some of what they know was learned during training rather than looked up live. Profile corrections can show up in Google's AI Overviews within weeks. Being named by ChatGPT or Gemini for a competitive query takes longer, and depends on sources you do not own catching up.

Nobody can guarantee an AI citation, and there is no submission form. What is controllable is whether the evidence about you exists, agrees with itself, and is specific enough to quote.

Re-run the test in a month. Same twenty queries, same four assistants, same log. The single result tells you where you stand; the trend tells you whether anything worked.

If you want the wider version of this as a checklist, the free local SEO checklist covers the 17 things worth checking before anyone quotes you for work. The GEO and AEO service page explains what this looks like as ongoing work rather than a one-off test.