How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business

Answer engines respond to whole questions, so test with the questions a customer would type. Write five, such as “who is a good accountant for a small business in Leeds?” or “which firms fit heat pumps near me?”, and put each to ChatGPT, to Google with AI answers showing, and to Perplexity.

• Ask each question several times, on different days.
• Record whether your business is named, and who is named instead.
• Note the sources each engine shows beside its answer.

Each engine reads the web with its own crawler, and a site can block them without meaning to. The site’s robots.txt file lists which crawlers are refused. OpenAI publishes the names GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User; Perplexity uses PerplexityBot; Google uses its ordinary crawler for AI answers in Search. Microsoft’s Copilot draws on Bing’s index, so a site that Bing cannot crawl is missing there too.

Engines quote what is stated plainly. The pages most often cited say, in ordinary sentences, what the business does, where, for whom and on what terms.

• State the facts on the page itself, not only in images or downloads.
• Keep the business name, address and phone number the same everywhere they appear.
• Add structured data, the labelled facts that tell a machine what kind of business this is.
• Answer specific questions in their own sections, each with a heading that asks the question.

The sources an engine cites for a market show where it gets its picture of that market. Directories, review sites, trade bodies and local press appear again and again. Being listed and described accurately on those sites puts a business into the material the engines read.

Models are updated and the web changes, so last month’s result does not hold. Keep the same five questions and the same record, and compare month with month.