How to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business

You can get a rough read on your AI visibility in an afternoon. The important part is to avoid reading too much into any one answer, because assistants do not give the same answer twice. A few minutes of careful method gives you something far more useful than a single screenshot.

Step by step

1. Write ten questions a customer would ask before choosing a provider like you, without using your own name
2. Open a fresh chat in each assistant, so earlier chats do not influence the answer
3. Ask each question three times and note who is named each time
4. Record the sources that are cited, if the assistant shows them
5. Repeat next week and compare the shares, not individual answers

What to look for

• The share of answers that name you
• Which competitors are named instead
• Whether the description of you is accurate
• Which sources the assistant relies on

A spreadsheet is enough to start

One row per question and assistant, one column per week, and a cell for how many of the answers named you. After a month you will see which questions you win, which you never appear in, and which swing from week to week.

Reading the numbers

If you appear in two of three answers one week and none the next, that is not necessarily a change in your fortunes. It may be chance. Look for a sustained shift over several weeks, and treat a single bad week with suspicion.

What to do with what you find

• If a description is wrong, find the source it came from and correct it there
• If a competitor is named often, look at which pages and sources support them
• If you are never named, check that your key pages are indexed and answer the question clearly

This is the manual version. We run the same method every week across six assistants, with enough samples to show a range.

The manual method gets slow past a few questions. Here is how we run it every week as an AI visibility service, and the full method in detail.