Most owners find out the hard way: a customer says "I asked ChatGPT and it sent me to your competitor." You can find out on purpose instead. This guide gives you a manual method that takes twenty minutes and costs nothing, then the free tools that make it repeatable.
Key takeaways
Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, not "do you know my business". Turn web search on. Record who is named, in what order, and which sites the answer cites. Then check whether those sites can even read your pages. Do it again in a month.
Step 1: Write down ten customer questions
Not "what is Acme Dental". Nobody asks that. Write the questions a stranger types before they know you exist:
- "Best family dentist in Austin with weekend hours"
- "Dentist near me that takes Delta Dental"
- "Is Acme Dental good?" (one branded question is fine)
- "Invisalign in Austin, how much does it cost?"
For a software product the shape changes: "best invoicing app for freelancers", "FreshBooks alternatives", "invoicing app with Stripe sync", "is Ledgerly worth it".
Aim for a mix: finding options, comparing, price, trust, and one "is it any good".
Step 2: Ask ChatGPT with search on
Open ChatGPT, make sure web search is enabled, and paste each question in a fresh chat. A fresh chat matters: earlier messages shape later answers. For each one, note three things:
- Who is named, in order.
- Why: the phrase attached to each name, such as "open Saturdays" or "generous free tier".
- Which sites are cited. Click the sources. Those pages are where the answer came from.
Then repeat in Perplexity and Gemini. They read different sources and answer differently, and OpenAI's own ChatGPT search page is clear that answers depend on the live results it retrieves.
Step 3: Ask the mirror question
Now ask "What do you know about Acme Dental in Austin?" and read the answer as an auditor. Every sentence is a claim. Mark each one:
- Correct
- Wrong (the wrong city, a service you do not offer)
- Missing (it did not mention your hours, prices, or a service you are known for)
Wrong and missing facts are the fastest fixes you will find. They usually mean the fact is not stated in plain text anywhere a crawler reads.
Step 4: Check that AI can read you at all
Three quick checks, all free:
- AI bots. Run our AI bots checker on your domain. It reads your robots.txt for sixteen AI user agents and then loads your homepage as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. A surprising number of sites block them by accident through a firewall rule.
- llms.txt. The llms.txt checker validates the file or drafts one from your homepage.
- Structured data. The schema checker lists what your JSON-LD declares and what is missing.
If any of those fail, fix them before writing a word of content. Assistants cannot recommend what they cannot read.
Step 5: Score the page you want cited
Pick the page that should answer the most common question, usually your services or pricing page, and run it through the citability checker. It scores thirteen signals: an answer-first opening, question-shaped headings, specific numbers, a visible date, lists or tables, structured data, a FAQ. Pages that score under 40 rarely get quoted.
Step 6: Record it and come back in a month
Put the ten questions, the names, the reasons and the cited sites in a sheet with the date. Make your fixes. Ask again in four weeks in fresh chats. The questions that start naming you are your proof that the work mattered.
The automated version
The manual method works. It also takes twenty minutes per assistant per month, and you will not remember the exact wording next time. The free TangentFlow scan does steps 1 to 5 in about a minute: it generates the questions for your market, asks ChatGPT with search on, records who is named and why, runs the mirror audit and the technical checks, and drafts the fixes. Saving the report re-checks every week across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude and emails you when a question flips.
FAQ
Why does ChatGPT give a different answer each time?
Because it searches the web each time and samples the results. Ask each question two or three times and look for names that recur. Trends over weeks are the signal.
Should I ask with my location on?
Ask both ways. Consumers often have location on and get local answers; a customer in another city does not. Put the city in the question itself for the clearest result.
Does it help to tell ChatGPT about my business?
No. Nothing you type into your own chat changes what it tells other people. Only the public web does.
Sources
- OpenAI, Introducing ChatGPT search: https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/
- Google, AI features and your website: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- Perplexity help centre on sources and citations: https://www.perplexity.ai/help-center
- TangentFlow free tools: https://tangentflow.com/tools
