How to check what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI say about your business

The fastest way to find out where you stand in AI answers is to ask the AI engines the same questions your customers ask, and write down what they say. It takes about 20 minutes and gives you a baseline you can measure against later. Here is how to do it well.

Step 1: Write down the questions your customers ask

Start with five to ten questions a real buyer would type before choosing a business like yours. Use their words, not yours. A few patterns that work for most businesses:

• “Who is the best [service] in [city]?”
• “What should I look for in a [type of provider]?”
• “[Your company] reviews” or “Is [your company] legit?”
• “What does [your company] do?”
• “[Competitor] vs [your company]”
• “How much does [service] cost?”

If you have a sales team, ask them what prospects say on the first call. Those are your questions.

Step 2: Ask each question in each engine

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google (with AI Overviews or AI Mode turned on). Ask every question in every engine. Use a fresh chat for each question so earlier answers do not influence later ones.

For each answer, record three things:

1. Are you named? Yes or no.
2. How are you described? Copy the sentence. Note anything wrong, outdated, or vague.
3. Who else is named, and which sources are cited? Competitors, directories, review sites, articles.

A spreadsheet with one row per question and one column per engine is enough.

Step 3: Look for the patterns

Three patterns show up in almost every first audit.

You are missing from questions you should win. This usually means your pages do not answer that question directly, or the engine cannot find a clear description of what you do. The fix is answer-first content: a page whose first sentence answers the question plainly.

You are described wrongly. Old services, a previous address, a vague or generic summary. Engines pull from your site, your listings, and third-party pages, so inconsistency between those sources shows up as errors. The fix is to make your site, directories, and profiles say the same thing.

A competitor is cited because of a third-party source. Often a directory, a review platform, or an article the engine trusts. That tells you where mentions matter for your category.

Step 4: Save the baseline and repeat it

Keep the spreadsheet. In a month, run the same questions again and compare. Because AI engines re-crawl often, fixes to your site and listings can show up within weeks, and seeing the before-and-after is how you know what worked.

What to do with the results

If you want to act on the audit yourself, start with the pages that match the questions where you were missing. Give each one a direct answer in the opening sentence, add FAQ schema, and make sure your business is described the same way everywhere. If you would rather have it done for you, that is exactly what an AnswerLion audit covers, followed by the fixes and monthly tracking.