How do I check what AI says about my company?

Write down the five questions your buyers actually ask, run each through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and log three things per answer: whether you were named, which competitors were, and which sources the engine cited. It takes about an hour, costs nothing, and the citation trace is the part that tells you where the problem actually is.

Step 1 — Write the five questions

Questions about the problem you solve, not about you. Nobody asks an engine about your company by name until they already know it exists. Useful shapes:

best [your category] for [your buyer type]
[your category] manufacturers [region]
[biggest competitor] alternatives
how do I select / size / spec [the thing you make]
who should I contact to [outcome you deliver]

If you are unsure, pull the exact phrasing from your last ten sales calls or RFQ emails. Buyers use different words than your marketing does, and the buyer's words are the ones typed into the box.

Step 2 — Run them across three engines

ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, free tiers are fine. Use a fresh chat per company or topic so earlier context does not contaminate the answer. That is fifteen answers. In a spreadsheet, log per answer: were you named (yes/no), which competitors were named, and how the engine described whoever it put first.

The description column is the one people skip and the one that pays. It tells you which proof points the engine considers decisive in your category — certifications, lead time, published engineering data, size range. That is a content brief, handed to you.

Step 3 — Trace the citations. This is the important step.

Perplexity shows sources on every answer; ChatGPT shows them when it searches the web; Gemini surfaces them on many responses. Click through and write down the exact pages.

What you will usually find is that the cited pages are not your competitors' homepages. They are trade listicles, association directories, distributor catalogs, review sites and forum threads. Those pages are the actual battleground, and knowing which ones they are converts a vague "we're invisible" into a specific, short list of places to go.

A better prompt than the obvious one

Try: "You are a [your buyer's role] shopping for [your category]. Walk me through how you would research this and who you would pick." The reasoning it shows you is more useful than a flat "best X" list, because it exposes which signals the engine weights before it commits to names.

Step 4 — Close the gap, in two moves

Move one: get onto the cited pages. Pitch the authors of the listicles that came up. Claim and complete your directory and association profiles. Make sure your distributors' listings for your products are accurate. Ask satisfied customers to leave reviews on the sites the engines actually quoted.

Move two: publish one page per question. The question as the headline, the answer in the first two sentences, the detail underneath. Real spec tables rather than prose or PDFs.

Most programs do only move two. In categories where citations run through directories and trade media, move two alone will not change the answer.

Step 5 — Re-run it monthly

Answers shift constantly, and the same prompt can return different names on two consecutive runs. A single audit is a snapshot. Keep the query set fixed, re-run it on the same day each month, and compare against the prior month — the delta is the only thing that means anything.

Why we publish this

Because you can do it, and because the audit was never the hard part. Running fifteen prompts is an hour. Turning the result into content your engineers will sign off on, published consistently every month, is the part that takes a program. If you run this and want the version with four engines, a written gap analysis and a 90-day content map, that is our $500 pilot.

Find out who gets named in your niche

The $500 audit runs 15 real buyer queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, logs who gets cited query by query, and comes back with a 90-day content map and two ready-to-publish articles. Fixed scope, two weeks. The fee is credited to your first retainer month if you continue.

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