Is your business visible to ChatGPT? A 10-minute check
In short: Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity ten questions your customers would ask, note which businesses get named, then check five things on your own site: can AI crawlers read it, does each page answer its question in the first two sentences, are your name, address and services identical everywhere online, do trusted sites mention you, and is your content recent.
Step 1 — Ask the questions your customers ask
Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Ask ten prompts like "best knitwear manufacturer in Ludhiana for a UK buyer" or "which dental clinic in Mohali is good for implants". Write down who gets named and which websites are cited. That list is your real competition in AI search.
Step 2 — Check whether AI can read your site
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it blocks GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, the assistants cannot read you. Also check that your important text is in the HTML, not injected by JavaScript after load.
Step 3 — Does each page answer its question first?
AI engines lift the sentence that answers the question directly. If your service page opens with "Welcome to our website", nothing is liftable. Put a plain two-sentence answer under every heading: who you are, what you do, where, for whom, from what price.
Step 4 — Is your business the same everywhere?
Name, address, phone, founding year and service list should be identical on your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Justdial and directories. Inconsistency is how an assistant decides you might be two different businesses, or none.
Step 5 — Do trusted sites mention you?
Brand mentions on sites the engines trust — industry publications, directories like Clutch or GoodFirms, local news, Reddit threads — predict citations better than raw link counts. Case studies and original data are the easiest way to earn them.
What does not help
Publishing an llms.txt file does no harm, but Google has said it does not use it and most AI crawlers rarely fetch it. Keyword-stuffed city pages hurt: Google applies its spam policies to AI answers too.
If you want us to run this check for you, send us your site on WhatsApp and we will reply with the findings.
Questions people ask us
Does ranking on Google mean AI will cite me?
It helps, especially for Google AI Overviews, but each assistant sources differently. Perplexity favours fresh pages and community mentions; ChatGPT leans on Bing's index and encyclopedic structure.
Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?
If you want customers to find you through AI assistants, no. Allow the search-related bots at minimum.
How often should I repeat the check?
Monthly. Citations shift quickly, so keep a simple log of the same ten prompts.