How do I check what ChatGPT says about my business?

Open ChatGPT and ask it the questions a customer would ask, then record what comes back. The mistake most owners make is searching their own name. Asking “what is Acme Ltd?” tells you whether the model recognises you, which matters, but it is not where customers are won. Customers ask category questions: “best small-batch coffee roaster UK”, “who should I use for contract reviews?”. Whether you appear in those answers is the number that affects revenue.

A proper check, step by step

1. Write the buyer questions. Eight to twelve of them: category recommendations, problem phrasings that never name any brand, direct questions about you, and comparisons against your obvious alternatives.
2. Ask more than one assistant. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini answer differently and draw on different sources. Perplexity is especially useful because it shows citations, so you can see exactly which pages informed the answer.
3. Record three things per answer. Did you appear at all? How were you described, and is the description accurate and current? Which competitors were named, and how often compared with you?
4. Repeat the run. Model answers vary between attempts. One flattering answer proves little; a pattern across questions and providers is a measurement.

What the results mean

If you never appear in category questions, the models have no basis to recommend you: your site does not answer those questions and the sources they cite do not mention you. If you appear but are described incorrectly, the information the models have is stale or muddled, which is fixable with clear, current, machine-readable pages. If a competitor dominates, the citations will usually show you exactly which pages earned them that position.

The honest caveats

Checking by hand in the chat apps mixes in your own history and location, so your view is not your customer’s view. Using the models’ APIs gives a cleaner, repeatable measurement, though it differs from the consumer apps in grounding. Either way, treat any single answer as weather and the pattern as climate.

Doing this properly by hand takes an afternoon, and repeating it after every site change takes another. We built Sourcive to do the whole measurement in minutes: it generates your buyer questions from your actual site, asks all four providers through their real APIs, and scores whether and how you appear, with every raw answer preserved.