Why asking ChatGPT about yourself doesn't work
The instinct is to open ChatGPT and type "what do you know about my company?" That tells you almost nothing useful, for two reasons.
First, naming your brand in the question guarantees it appears in the answer. You have asked a question no customer would ask, and got a reassuring answer to it. Your buyers type "best project management tool for a small team" — and whether you appear in *that* answer is the thing that matters.
Second, if you are signed in, the assistant may have memory of your previous conversations. You are not seeing what a stranger sees.
The questions worth asking
Good test questions have one property: a reasonable answer could name businesses like yours, without the question naming you. In practice that means a mix of intents:
- Best-of — "best accounting software for freelancers"
- How-to-choose — "how do I pick a CRM for a 5-person sales team"
- Comparison — "X vs Y for e-commerce"
- Trust — "is X a reputable supplier"
- Where to buy — "what is worth buying at <the shop they use>", when the brand sells through one
Ask each question more than once
This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether your result means anything.
AI answers are not deterministic. The same question, asked twice, can return different brands in a different order. If you ask once and see your name, you do not know whether you are reliably recommended or got lucky. If you ask once and don't, you do not know whether you are invisible or merely unlucky.
Repeating each question turns a coin flip into a rate. Three runs tell you whether a result is stable; one run tells you a story.
Record two things, not one
For each answer, note whether your brand was named in the text, and separately whether your site appeared among the cited sources. These come apart constantly, and the fix differs: being unnamed is a reputation and third-party-coverage problem, while being uncited is usually a crawlability and content-structure problem.
Check your own domain
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Common questions
Does ChatGPT see my website directly?
When it searches the web, it fetches pages the way a crawler does — so if your robots.txt blocks GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot, it cannot read you. Some answers also come from training data rather than a live fetch, which is why third-party coverage matters as much as your own site.
How often should I re-check?
Monthly is enough to see a trend for most categories. Weekly makes sense while you are actively changing things and want to know whether a change worked.
Can I change what ChatGPT says about me?
Yes, though not instantly. There are six routes in: whether the assistants can read your site at all, whether your pages are written the way they quote (reference and documentation pages out-cite marketing pages), whether you appear on other people's pages, whether they can tell which company you are, what you can hand them directly such as a product feed, and what your customers say. Reviews are one of the six and the smallest of them: review sites are under 1% of AI citations.
Related questions
Last updated 24 August 2026