Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity the questions your customers ask, record who they recommend and which pages they cite, then fix what keeps you out of the answers.
Who it is for
Local and small businesses wondering whether AI assistants mention them when customers ask for a recommendation.
Tools
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
A simple sheet to record results
Access to your website's robots.txt
Steps
Write 5 questions a real customer would ask, with your town, like who is the best plumber in Rutland VT.
Ask each assistant every question in a fresh chat with search turned on. Record who is named, in what order, and the pages cited.
Check your site allows the search crawlers you want. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is used for ChatGPT search results and is set separately from GPTBot, its training crawler.
Compare your pages with the pages that got cited: do they state services, area, hours and prices plainly?
Make your business details clear and consistent. Google documents LocalBusiness structured data with name and address required.
Re-run the same 5 questions monthly and compare.
The prompt
I want to see whether AI assistants recommend my business. Help me plan the check.
Business: [NAME], [SERVICE], [TOWN, STATE]
Website: [URL]
Competitors I know: [NAMES]
Give me:
1. Five questions a real customer would type, using my town.
2. A simple table to record, per assistant and question: who was named, in what order, and which pages were cited.
3. After I paste my results: the three most likely reasons I was missing, based only on what I pasted, and one fix for each.
Do not guess results you have not seen.
Tips
Use fresh chats so earlier conversations do not steer the answer.
Record the cited pages; they show what kind of page the assistants trust.
Run it from a phone too; answers can differ by device and location.