How to check if ChatGPT mentions your business (a 20-minute test)
One search tells you almost nothing, because AI answers change between runs. Here's a simple, repeatable way to test ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for your business.
Most owners check once. They type “best plumber in my town” into ChatGPT, don't see their name, and conclude they're invisible. Or they do see it and stop worrying. Neither conclusion holds up, because the same question can get a different list each time. Studies of local AI answers have found the lists shift a lot from one run to the next.
So the useful question isn't “am I mentioned?” but “how often am I mentioned, for which questions, and who gets named instead?”. Here's a test you can run in about twenty minutes, then repeat monthly.
1. Write down five real customer questions
Not keywords. Questions, the way a customer would say them out loud. Mix three kinds:
- The direct ask: “Who's a good emergency electrician in Grand Rapids?”
- The specific need: “Which dentists in Boise take Delta Dental and do Saturday appointments?”
- The research question: “How much does a panel upgrade cost in Michigan, and who does them?”
If you're stuck, our industry guides list the questions people typically ask in each trade.
2. Ask in a clean session
ChatGPT can use your approximate location, and if memory is switched on it may know you own the business you're asking about. Both can skew the result. In ChatGPT, use a Temporary Chat, which doesn't use or create memories. Include the town in the question rather than relying on location. For Google, use a private browser window. Perplexity shows its sources by default, which makes it the easiest of the three to diagnose.
3. Ask each question three times
Start a fresh chat each time. For each run, write down:
- Whether you were named, and in what position
- Who else was named
- Which sources were cited (in ChatGPT, open the sources list; in Perplexity they're numbered under the answer)
- Anything wrong: old hours, a service you don't offer, the wrong town
Five questions, three runs, three assistants is 45 answers. A simple spreadsheet with one row per answer is enough. Your score is the share of answers that name you.
4. Read the sources, not just the names
This is the part most people skip, and it's where the fixes are. If the competitor who keeps getting named is cited from Yelp, a trade directory or a local news article, that tells you where the assistant is reading. If your own site is never cited, check whether it can be read at all. In our scan of 101 US small-business sites, a firewall returning HTTP 403 to automated requests was a more common problem than robots.txt rules.
The AI Crawler Checker shows which AI bots your robots.txt allows, and the SEO Health Snapshot checks whether your pages return text without JavaScript.
5. Check your traffic, too
Mentions without clicks are still worth having, but clicks are easier to count. OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it shows, so those visits appear in Google Analytics. Our guide to tracking AI referral traffic walks through the report.
What to do with the results
- Never named, own site never cited: start with access. Crawlers, firewall, indexing in Google and Bing.
- Named for direct asks, not for specific needs: your site probably doesn't state the details (insurance, hours, specialities) as text. Write them down.
- Named with wrong details: see how to fix wrong information in AI answers.
- A competitor named every time: read the pages cited for them. That's your to-do list.
If you'd rather not do it by hand, the AI Visibility Quick Scan runs a short version for free, and our $99 Snapshot audit runs 10 customer questions across 4 AI engines and turns the results into a fix list.
Sources
How to show up in each AI assistant
All engine guides →Rather not do this yourself? We'll do the whole thing and send you the receipts.