How to find out what ChatGPT says about your company
Ask it. But not once, not by name, and not from your own account. A single answer to “what do you know about us?” tells you almost nothing about what your customers hear. Here is how to ask so the answer means something.
1. Ask the questions your customers ask
Nobody outside your company types your name first. They ask “best accounting software for a small restaurant” or “who should I hire to redo my kitchen in Leeds”. Write ten of those: a few broad ones, a few comparisons, a few that start from a problem. Your name should not be in any of them. Whether you appear anyway is the thing you are measuring.
2. Use a clean session
Your own account remembers you. It knows where you work and what you asked last week, and it shapes its answers around that. Ask logged out, or in a temporary chat with memory switched off, so you see what a stranger sees.
3. Ask more than once
This is the step most people skip. The same question gives different answers on different runs. In our study of a stock question, one app gave the same first pick in 10 runs out of 10 and another in 1 out of 10, and the names in one answer overlapped with the names in the next by anywhere from 14% to 74%.
So one screenshot proves nothing, in either direction. Ask each question at least five times and count.
4. Ask more than one assistant
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews do not agree with each other. Some search the web for every answer and follow this week’s articles. Others answer mostly from what they learned in training. A brand can be a regular on one and absent on another.
5. Write down the same five things every time
| What to record | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Were you named? | The basic rate: named in how many answers out of how many. |
| Were you the recommendation? | Being listed fifth is not being chosen. |
| Who was named instead? | Your real competitors in AI answers, which are not always the ones you expect. |
| Which websites did the answer cite? | That is where the answer came from, and where you need to be mentioned. |
| What did it state about you? | Founding year, prices, services: check each one. Some will be wrong, and some will have no source. |
What to do with it
If a fact about you is wrong, fix it where the assistants read: state it plainly on your own site, and correct it on the pages they cite. If competitors are named and you are not, look at the cited websites first. They usually name your competitors and not you, and that is a list you can work through.
When this stops working by hand
Ten questions, five runs, five assistants is 250 answers to read, and the result goes stale within weeks because the models and the web keep changing. That is the job NUR does: the same questions, asked the same way on a consistent schedule, every answer kept and read the same way, so you see a rate and a trend instead of a screenshot.