How to check if ChatGPT knows your business
A repeatable 30-minute test across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude — and the three mistakes that make most people read their own results backwards.
Almost everyone runs this test wrong the first time, and the wrong version is reassuring — which is worse than useless. Here is the version that produces a number you can act on, and repeat in a month to see whether anything moved.
The three mistakes that ruin the result
- 1Testing while signed in. ChatGPT personalises from your history and memory, including every previous time you discussed your own company. It will mention you — to you, and to nobody else.
- 2Asking about yourself by name. “What is Acme?” tests recall of a name you supplied. Your buyers don't know your name yet; that's the problem. Ask the question *they* ask.
- 3Asking once. Answers vary between sessions. One miss is noise. A miss across ten questions and four engines is a finding.
Write the ten questions first
Before opening a single engine, write down the ten questions a buyer asks in the week before they choose someone like you. In their words, not your internal vocabulary. A good set mixes four shapes:
| Shape | Example | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Category discovery | best CRM for a two-person startup | Whether you're in the consideration set at all |
| Comparison | Notion vs Airtable for a small agency | Whether you're framed against the right alternatives |
| Cost | how much does a Shopify agency cost | Whether you own the commercial question |
| Local or vertical | immigration lawyer for startup founders in Toronto | Whether the qualifiers reach you |
Run the test
- 1
Open a private window
Signed out on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Four tabs.
- 2
Ask question one on all four
Same wording, one at a time, fresh conversation each.
- 3
Record four things per answer
Were you named at all? In what position — first, or fifth? Which competitors were named? Were any of your pages cited?
- 4
Repeat for all ten questions
Forty data points. This takes about half an hour and it is the whole job.
- 5
Score it
Mention rate is the count of answers naming you, over forty. That single number is your baseline. Write down the date.
Reading the result
| Mention rate | What it means | What to do first |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | The engines cannot place you in this category at all | Entity clarity: say what you are, plainly, on the homepage |
| 1–20% | Known, but not a default answer | Comparison and cost content for the questions you lose |
| 20–50% | In the consideration set | Corroboration — get described the same way off your own domain |
| Over 50% | A default answer in your category | Defend it, and widen the question set |
Whatever the number, also look at *who* won. Open the pages the engines cited. That is the bar you have to clear, written down for you by a competitor.
The technical half you can't see this way
The prompt test tells you where you stand. It cannot tell you why. The usual causes are mechanical: content that only exists after JavaScript runs, a crawler blocked in robots.txt, no structured data, or a homepage that never states what the company is.
Our free scan checks that half against your homepage in about ten seconds — schema, server rendering, crawler access, entity clarity — and scores each one. Run it alongside the prompt test and you have both halves of the picture.
Repeat it monthly
The same ten questions, the same four engines, the same signed-out conditions, once a month. Without a fixed set you cannot distinguish a change that worked from a model update that happened to help — and that distinction is the entire difference between doing this and guessing.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I check if ChatGPT knows my business?
- Ask the ten questions your buyers ask — not your company name — in a signed-out private window, and record whether you're named, in what position, and whether your pages are cited. Repeat across Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Forty data points takes about thirty minutes.
- Why does ChatGPT mention my business to me but not to others?
- Because you're signed in. ChatGPT personalises from your conversation history and memory, including previous times you discussed your own company. Always test signed out.
- Is there a tool that checks this automatically?
- Tools exist that track brand mentions across engines, including ours. They're worth it once you're measuring continuously. For a first read, doing it by hand is free and teaches you more, because you see the full answers and the competitors' pages.
- How often should I re-check?
- Monthly. Technical changes can register in days, but content and corroboration take a month or two, and answers vary enough between sessions that a weekly cadence mostly measures noise.
- What if ChatGPT says something wrong about my business?
- State the correct version plainly on your own site — homepage, about page, and in your structured data — and get it corroborated on third-party pages. Models weight agreement across domains, so one page contradicting an old fact rarely moves it.
See how AI engines describe you right now.
The free scan checks the technical signals in this article against your homepage — schema, rendering, crawler access, entity clarity — and scores each one.
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