Does ChatGPT know your company exists? A 20-minute check.

Somewhere this week a buyer typed "best commercial roofer near Syracuse" into ChatGPT instead of Google. Or asked Perplexity which DST sponsors are worth a look. Or got an AI Overview at the top of the results page and never scrolled past it. The engine named three or four companies. Either you were one of them or you weren't, and most businesses have no idea which.

This is the twenty-minute check I run in week one of every SEO engagement. You can do it yourself today. You'll need a spreadsheet and accounts on the engines, which are free.

Step one: write ten prompts the way a buyer would

Not keywords. Questions. The way someone talks to an assistant, with the detail a real buyer includes.

• "Who are the best [what you do] in [your city or region]?"
• "I need a [what you do] for [the common job]. Who should I call near [place]?"
• "Compare [your company] and [your biggest competitor]."
• "What does [your service] cost in [region] and who's reputable?"
• "Is [your company] any good?"

Fill out the rest from your last ten sales calls. Whatever people asked you on the phone, they're asking the engine first.

Step two: run them on four engines

ChatGPT with browsing on, Perplexity, Gemini, and a normal Google search to see whether an AI Overview appears and what it says. Ten prompts, four engines, forty answers. Log three things for each: whether you were named, who was named instead, and what sources the engine cited or linked. That last column is the one most people skip, and it's the one that tells you what to do.

Step three: read the sources column

When the engines don't name you, the sources column almost always explains why, and it's usually one of three things.

Nobody else says what you say. The engines lean hard on third parties: review sites, directories, local press, Reddit threads, association listings. If the only place on the internet that says you're a great roofer is your own homepage, the engine has nothing to corroborate. Your competitor with 140 Google reviews and a write-up in the local business journal gets named, and the engine will usually cite exactly those.

Your pages don't state facts plainly. Open your services page and try to answer, from the text alone: what exactly do you do, where, for whom, since when, and what does it cost? If the answer is a paragraph of "we're passionate about excellence," the engine can't lift anything from it. The competitor whose page says "Commercial flat-roof replacement, Onondaga and Madison counties, since 2004, typical projects $40K–$300K" is quotable. Quotable wins.

The engine isn't sure who you are. Different names across your site, your Google Business Profile, and your directory listings. An address that doesn't match. A category that's wrong. The engines build an idea of each business from everything they can find, and if the pieces don't agree, you get left out of the answer rather than guessed about.

What to fix, in order

Fix the identity problems first, because they're cheap and they block everything else: one name, one address, one phone number, the right categories, everywhere. Then rewrite the three or four pages that answer your buyers' prompts so a stranger, or a model, could lift the facts out in a sentence. Then go earn the corroboration: reviews on the platforms the engines cited, listings on the directories they cited, a mention in the local press or the trade association that showed up in the sources column. You don't have to guess where to be. The engines told you.

Then run the ten prompts again in thirty days. Keep the spreadsheet. It's the only AI-visibility report that matters, and it's the one I send clients every month.

If you'd rather I ran it, the free SEO audit includes the check: your buyers' prompts across the engines, who gets named, and what I'd fix first. Send me your website and it's in your inbox within 24 hours.