How to check whether your business appears in ChatGPT.

This guide gives marketing and commercial teams a practical way to measure their starting point. It does not reproduce OpenAI's internal ranking systems, and results can change with the prompt, location, available sources and model behaviour.

What should you measure?

The 30-minute testing protocol

1. Define the buyer journey. Write down the service, market and customer you want to be discovered for. Avoid testing only your brand name.
2. Use a clean session. Start a new chat without previous company context. State the location in the prompt when local relevance matters.
3. Run the same prompt set. Test discovery, comparison, problem and decision prompts. Do not keep rewriting a prompt until your company appears.
4. Open the sources. Record the domains and individual pages cited. A brand mention and a source citation are different signals.
5. Log the result. Capture the exact prompt, date, market, response, cited sources and competitors mentioned.
6. Repeat monthly. Use the same core prompts so movement is comparable, then add new prompts when customer demand changes.

Ten prompts you can adapt

1. What are the best [service] companies for [customer type] in [market]?
2. Which [service] providers in [market] specialise in [specific use case]?
3. Compare credible options for [service] in [market]. Include strengths and limitations.
4. Who can help a [company type] solve [specific operational problem] in [market]?
5. What should I look for when selecting a [service] provider in [market]?
6. Recommend a shortlist of [service] providers for a [company size] business.
7. Which companies publish useful evidence about [topic] in [market]?
8. What are the alternatives to [known competitor] for [use case]?
9. Find a local provider that can integrate [system A] with [system B].
10. What is the most practical way to solve [problem], and which providers can implement it?

Record the result properly

Use one row per prompt. Recommended columns are: date, AI assistant, model if shown, country, language, exact prompt, company mentioned, company cited, recommendation position, cited URL, competitors named, accuracy notes and next action.

Important: Do not turn one session into a percentage visibility score. A useful baseline needs a defined prompt set, repeated observations and evidence you can inspect. Treat the output as directional research, not a guaranteed rank.

If your business does not appear

Start with evidence that search and AI systems can actually access and understand. Publish clear service and location pages, make important information available in HTML, connect related pages internally, identify your company and authors consistently, and earn corroboration from credible external sources.

Google states that the same foundational SEO practices apply to its AI search features, with no special AI schema required. OpenAI separates OAI-SearchBot, used for ChatGPT search visibility, from GPTBot, which is used for training. Check that your robots rules do not accidentally block the search crawler you want to access your content.

Useful next steps

Run the free Lynx AI Search Visibility Check to assess crawlability, entity clarity, citable evidence and authority. Then review the UAE AI search visibility benchmark to see which public trust signals are still uncommon.

Primary guidance used

• OpenAI crawler documentation
• Google: AI features and your website
• Google: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content