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What ChatGPT says about your business, and how to check it yourself
A customer opens an assistant and types "best English speaking dentist in Fuengirola". Something comes back. It is a short answer with two or three businesses named in it, not a page of ten links, and the customer will act on it the way they used to act on a recommendation from a neighbour.
Three things can be true about your business in that answer. You are named and the details are right. You are named and something is wrong. Or you are not there at all and a competitor is.
Most owners have never looked. This is how to look, what to record, and what to do with each of the three results. It takes about fifteen minutes a week for two weeks, it costs nothing, and you do not need us for any of it.
ABOUT A 12 MINUTE READ NOTHING TO INSTALL RUN IT IN BOTH LANGUAGES
Why this is not the same as your Google ranking
You may already pay for a report that tells you where you rank. It is still worth having, and it will not answer this question.
There is one answer, not ten links. A results page has room for you at position seven. A written answer names two or three businesses and stops. Position seven does not exist.
The answer is assembled, not retrieved. It is written out of material the assistant has read about you, from your own site and from wherever else you are described. That means an answer can be confidently wrong in a way a link cannot. A link to your old address is a link. A sentence saying you are in a town you left is a statement.
Nobody outside those companies knows the mechanism. Not us. There is no ranking dashboard, no verified position, no submission form. If somebody offers to guarantee you a place in an AI answer, they are describing a product that does not exist. What is available is the ordinary, unglamorous work of being accurately and consistently described in public, and then checking whether it landed.
What an assistant is reading about you
You cannot see inside the answer, but you can see the raw material, because almost all of it is public and you can read it yourself.
- Your own website. Specifically the plain sentences on it. What you do, who you do it for, where, in which languages, and what it costs to get in touch. A site that says "excellence, delivered" says nothing a machine can repeat.
- Directories and listings for your sector. The ones that exist in your industry rather than the ones an SEO reseller sold your predecessor.
- Review sites and marketplaces, where a description of you was written by somebody else.
- Press, association pages, supplier pages and event listings. Anywhere a third party described your business in a sentence.
- Anything stale that is still up. An old address, a closed branch, a service you stopped offering, a phone number that rings somewhere else.
The last one matters more than people expect. A machine has no way to know which of two contradictory descriptions of you is the current one, so it will sometimes pick the wrong one and state it plainly.
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The check, step by step
FIFTEEN MINUTES TWICE, A WEEK APART BOTH LANGUAGES IF YOU SERVE BOTH
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Write down ten questions your customers ask
Not the keywords you wish you ranked for. The sentence a person types when they have the problem and not the vocabulary. Mix four kinds:
- The category question. "Immigration lawyer in Marbella."
- The qualified question. "Immigration lawyer in Marbella who speaks English."
- The problem question. "How do I get residency in Spain if my paperwork was refused."
- The named question. "Is [your business name] any good." This one tells you what is being said about you specifically.
If you serve customers in two languages, write all ten in both. Do not translate them. Write them the way each kind of customer would type them, because a British buyer and a Spanish buyer ask different questions about the same service.
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Ask them in a clean session
Use a logged-out or private browser window, and turn off memory or personalisation if the tool has it. Your own account has been reading about your business for months and it will flatter you.
Ask the same ten in each of the assistants your customers are likely to use. Do them one at a time, in a fresh conversation each time, because a follow-up question inherits the answer before it.
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Record four things per question
A spreadsheet with five columns is enough. Do not skip the fourth column, because it is the one that turns this from an ego check into a plan.
Column What goes in it Question Exactly as you typed it, and the language Named Yes or no What was said Copy the sentence about you, word for word Who else was named Every other business in the answer, in order Wrong Anything factually incorrect, however small -
Do it again a week later
One run is a snapshot. Two runs, a week apart, tell you whether your position is stable or whether the answer moves around. Both are useful findings and they lead to different decisions. An answer that changes every time is not something to chase.
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Read the competitor column, not the ego column
Whoever keeps appearing in your place is the finding. Go and read their site with the question in mind. Nine times in ten they have not outspent you. They have written more, more specifically, and more recently about the exact thing that was asked.
What to do with each result
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If you are not named at all
Your business is probably not described anywhere in language a machine can use. That is a position, not a verdict, and it is the most fixable one on this list.
- Write the plain sentences. On your own site, in ordinary words: what you do, who for, where, in which languages, and how to reach you. One page can carry all of it.
- Answer the actual questions. A page that answers "how do I get residency in Spain if my paperwork was refused", in the words a person asks it, is worth more than a page about your values.
- Fix your name, address and phone everywhere. Identical, character for character, on every listing you can find. Inconsistency is the cheapest thing you can fix and the most common thing left broken.
- Get described by someone else. A supplier page, an association listing, a local business directory that has real users in your sector. Third-party descriptions carry more than another paragraph on your own site.
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If you are named and something is wrong
The most common result and the one worth doing first, because a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer.
Find the source. It is almost always one of three things: a stale page on your own site that you forgot, an old directory entry nobody has logged into since 2019, or a review-site profile created by someone else. Correct it at the source, then re-run the check in a few weeks. Corrections take time to propagate and you will not see it move the same afternoon.
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If you are named, correctly, behind a competitor
The good problem. You exist and you are accurate, and somebody is a better match for the question.
Read their answer sentence next to yours. Usually one of three things is true: they cover a specific thing the question asked about and you cover it generally, they have more recent material and yours is three years old, or they are described in the language of the question and you are described in the other one. All three are writing problems, not budget problems.
Three things not to do
NO GUARANTEED POSITIONS EXIST NOT FROM ANYONE
Do not buy a guaranteed position in an AI answer. There is no mechanism to sell you and no dashboard to verify it against. This is the same offer that was sold as guaranteed first page rankings a decade ago, wearing new clothes.
Do not write pages for the machine. Stuffing your site with the word AI, or publishing fifty near-identical pages with a town name swapped in, is the pattern that gets a site treated as a doorway network. It also makes the site unreadable for the customers who do arrive.
Do not act on one run. Answers vary between sessions. Change something because two runs a week apart agreed, not because one bad answer stung.
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What this check will not tell you
A method that only reports good news is a sales document. These are the limits.
It is a sample, not a measurement. Ten questions is enough to find obvious problems and not enough to be a statistic. Treat the output as a list of things to fix, in order.
Being named is not being chosen. Appearing in an answer puts you on a shortlist. What happens next is your website, your reply time and your price, exactly as before.
The assistants change without telling anyone. A finding from March does not hold in September. This is a thing to repeat quarterly, not a project to complete.
It says nothing about volume. Nobody publishes how many people asked. You are learning what is said about you, not how often.
Where we stand on this
OPERATIONAL SCALE OUR OWN BUSINESS NOT CLIENT RESULTS
We sell a paid version of this.
What it changes: we run it in both languages, against three rivals you name, with the answers quoted so you can read them yourself, plus a pass over the repetitive work on your desk, plus a plan in the order we would do it, plus the same three rivals re-run once at ninety days so you can see whether anything moved.
What it does not change: we cannot promise you a position either, and we do not. Nothing on this site attaches a claim to your traffic, your leads or your revenue, because there is no baseline in your market to promise against.
The only numbers we publish are what our own systems have processed in our own businesses. Our content engine has read and analysed 12,462 posts across 38 brands and 122 accounts since July 2026, and indexed 10,487 evidence passages out of them. That total is the whole tracked set rather than our own pet brand, which accounts for 223 of it. Those describe what a system did. They are not anybody's business results. The full record is in the Hairy Housemates case study.
Run it yourself first
Ten questions, a logged-out window, a spreadsheet with five columns. Do it twice, a week apart. If nothing is wrong, you have spent half an hour and learned that you are fine, which is worth knowing.
If it turns up something you do not want to look at on your own, that is what the AI Visibility Audit is for.
Or book a call and we will go through your ten questions with you.
Read next
- The AI Visibility Audit, this check run properly, in two languages, against three named rivals, with a ninety day plan.
- Two languages, one inbox, on what happens after the customer finds you and writes in the other language.
- The blog index, with the three strands and the questions we have not answered yet.
- Contact, to book a conversation or send a short message instead.