What does ChatGPT say about your business?

Why this is worth 10 minutes

A customer can ask “Who should I call to fix a leaking water heater in El Paso?” in ChatGPT, Gemini or Google and receive a short answer naming businesses. Checking those answers helps you see what someone might learn about yours.

Search-enabled answers can use public web pages, business listings and reviews. If the facts about your business are thin, out of date or hard for a search crawler to reach, the tool may miss them or repeat an error. You won’t know unless you look.

You can’t control what an AI tool says. You can check what it says, find where its information comes from, and fix the parts that are yours. That is what this guide walks through.

Before you start: two minutes

1. Open a private browser window. It reduces the effect of existing browsing sessions. Location and tool settings can still shape the answers, so record the city and context you use.

2. In ChatGPT, start a Temporary Chat and choose Unpersonalized. OpenAI’s current help page says Temporary Chat can use memory, custom instructions and plugins when personalized. Choose Unpersonalized before starting to leave those out of this check. Temporary Chat stays out of history unless you save it as a regular chat; account and workspace restrictions still apply.

3. Write down today’s date. The answers will change. A dated record is the only way to tell whether your fixes helped.

The five questions

Each question tests something different: whether you’re found at all, whether the tool knows who you are, whether your contact details are right, what it thinks you charge, and what it says about your reputation. Fill in the blanks and the worksheet writes them for you.

Ask each question in three places:

• ChatGPT, with search turned on so it shows the sources it used.
• Google, in a normal search. For some questions an AI Overview appears at the top; you can also try AI Mode.
• Gemini, Google’s assistant, which can draw on Google’s search index.

If you have time, ask question 1 twice in each tool. A name that appears both times is a stronger signal than one that appears once.

What your results mean

Look at the pattern, not one answer. Most results fall into one of four shapes.

Pattern 1You’re not mentioned at all

That result alone does not establish the cause. Check that your site is indexed and that your robots.txt isn’t turning search crawlers away. Start with fixes 3 and 4.

Pattern 2You’re mentioned, with the wrong facts

Old hours, an old phone number or a service you stopped offering. The tool is repeating a source. Find it: ChatGPT and Google’s AI usually link the pages they used. Then fix the facts where they live.

Pattern 3You’re found, but described vaguely

“A local company offering various services.” Your own pages probably don’t say plainly what you do, where and for whom. See fix 2.

Pattern 4Competitors are named, you aren’t

Compare the public facts, reviews and pages available for each business. Competitors appearing does not prove why yours was omitted. Fixes 1, 2 and 5 give you useful places to start; changes take time and do not guarantee a mention.

Five fixes in your control

In the order we’d tackle them. None of them needs special software.

1 Fix the facts where they live

Your Google Business Profile is what Google shows for your hours, phone and location in Search and Maps, so it’s the first place to get right. Google’s own advice is short: make your profile “as complete as possible”, verify it, and keep your hours current, including holiday hours. Then fix the same details anywhere else they appear: Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp, directories. When sources disagree, the tools have to guess. Our Google Business Profile checklist walks through every field.

2 Say it plainly on your website

Write the essential facts as visible page text, in plain sentences: what you do, where you work, who it’s for, how to reach you, and roughly what it costs if you’re willing to say. Images and PDFs can supplement those facts. If you offer several services, give each its own page so people and search systems can understand the scope.

3 Let the right crawlers in

Open yourwebsite.com/robots.txt in a browser. This file tells automated visitors what they may read. Look for Disallow: / under User-agent: *, Googlebot, Bingbot or OAI-SearchBot. Any of those can keep you out of answers:

• OAI-SearchBotOpenAI says sites that block it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”, although they can still appear as navigational links. Allow about 24 hours for a robots.txt change to be reflected.
• GooglebotGoogle’s AI Overviews and AI Mode use pages from Google Search. A page must be indexed and allowed to show a snippet.
• BingbotMicrosoft’s guidelines cover Bing search and Copilot answers together. If Bing can’t crawl a page, Copilot is unlikely to cite it.

Two names are a separate choice: GPTBot and Google-Extended control training and some Gemini grounding uses. Google says Google-Extended does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search. You can block those two while allowing the search crawlers. A robots.txt block prevents crawling; it does not necessarily remove an already indexed URL from Google Search.

Also check your hosting or security settings. Some services offer a one-click “block AI bots” switch; make sure it isn’t blocking search crawlers you want.

4 Register with both search consoles

Google Search Console (opens in a new tab) and Bing Webmaster Tools (opens in a new tab) are free. Verify your site in both and submit your sitemap. Google includes its AI search features in the ordinary Web Performance report. Bing introduced AI Performance in public preview in February 2026 to show citations in Copilot and other supported AI experiences. Keep citation counts separate from clicks, engagement and leads.

5 Answer your reviews, and recheck monthly

Google names “prominence”, how well known a business is, as one of the three things behind local results, and says positive reviews and helpful replies can help a business stand out. Reply to every review, briefly and specifically. Then put a monthly reminder in your calendar to rerun the five questions with the same wording, and keep the worksheets.

What you can skip

You’ll be offered plenty of “AI SEO” shortcuts. Be skeptical of anything that promises placement in AI answers. Google’s documentation for its AI features says there are no extra technical requirements and no special optimizations needed, and that you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear. Microsoft’s guidelines say the same in their own way: no one can guarantee a citation. Spend the money on the five fixes above first.

We ran it on ourselves

On October 7, 2026, we started with a limited check on PrimeBridge: searching for our own business name and our own web address. In the results returned by those two searches, we found other companies and no result about PrimeBridge. This was a name-and-domain check, not the full five-question worksheet.

Crawlers were allowed and the pages could be read, but that did not establish why the searches missed us. Our review found improvements we could make: business structured information, clearer city and contact facts, and separate About, Contact and FAQ pages.

On October 8 we published separate service, About, Contact and FAQ pages, with our city, phone number, plain descriptions of each service and structured information that search engines can read. On November 6, 2026 we’ll run the full five-question worksheet on ourselves in all three tools and add the results here: what changed, and what didn’t.