How to check what ChatGPT says about your business, by hand
Honest, step-by-step instructions for checking your own AI visibility, including why each question needs asking more than once.
You don’t need to hire anyone to get a first idea of where you stand. With an hour and a spreadsheet you can run a useful check yourself. Here is how to do it properly, and where the limits are.
1. Write the questions your customers ask
Think about real customers, not keywords. A patient looking for a clinic might ask:
- “Best clinic for laser hair removal in Dubai Marina”
- “Which dentist in JLT is good with nervous patients?”
- “Where can I get Invisalign in Dubai, and roughly how much is it?”
Write ten to fifteen. Include your area, your main services, and the kinds of detail people add: language, price, opening hours, “near me”. Avoid putting your own name in these questions. You want to know whether you come up unprompted.
2. Use a clean session
AI assistants can be influenced by your account history and past conversations. Log out, or use a private browser window, or start a fresh chat with memory turned off. If the tool asks for your location, allow it or mention your city in the question.
3. Ask each question three times
This is the step most people skip. Ask the same question three times, in three separate new chats. You will often get different lists. A business that appears once in three is in a very different position from one that appears every time.
4. Record what you see
For each answer, note:
- which businesses were named
- whether you were named
- which sources were linked or cited, if any
- anything the answer said about you, and whether it was correct
A simple spreadsheet works: one row per answer, one column per item above.
5. Repeat on the other engines
Run the same questions on Google Gemini, and search them on Google to see whether an AI Overview appears at the top. Results differ noticeably between engines, so one engine won’t tell you much about the others.
6. Count, don’t eyeball
Add it up. Out of all the answers, how many named you? That fraction is your AI Mention Rate. Then look at who was named most often instead, and which sources came up again and again.
7. Ask about yourself directly
Finally, ask each engine about your business by name: “What can you tell me about [your business] in Dubai?” Check every fact. Outdated addresses, old opening hours and services you no longer offer are common, and they are usually fixable.
What this won’t tell you
A hand check is a small sample. Fifteen questions, three runs, three engines is 135 answers, which is enough to spot a pattern but not enough to measure small changes. It is also easy to be inconsistent about wording or sessions without noticing.
It is still well worth doing. If you would like it done at larger scale, with the same questions re-run later to measure change, request a check. You can see what the result looks like in our sample report.