How do you check whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your business?

Most owners try this once. They type their business name into ChatGPT, see a decent answer, and relax. That test tells you almost nothing. Of course it knows your name when you hand it the name. The real question is whether it brings you up when a stranger asks for a company like yours. Here's how we check, step by step, and what we found when we ran it on ourselves.

Why is checking your own name not enough?

We ask AI assistants the same list of questions every week for our own studio. One of those questions is "What can you tell me about Disame Graphic?" Every answer to it mentions us. Of course it does.

Now look at the other 40 questions, the ones a customer would ask without knowing us: who is the best web design company in Copiague, who can run my SEO, how much does it cost. Across 569 answers to those questions, we were named in about 14.5%. On 14 of the 40 questions we were named in none.

answers that named us when the question was our own name (20 checks)

100%

answers that named us on 40 customer-style questions (569 checks)

14.5%

customer-style questions where no assistant named us

14 of 40

That gap is the whole point. Customers don't type your name. They ask for what you do, and the assistant picks a few businesses to name.

How do you run the check yourself?

You need a notebook or a spreadsheet and about 20 minutes. No paid tools. Here's the routine we use, trimmed down for one owner.

1. 01

   Write five customer questions

   Use the words a customer would use, with your town in them. "Who is the best plumber in Babylon?" beats "plumbing company". Add one price question ("How much does a water heater cost in Suffolk County?") and one "which should I pick" question.

2. 02

   Open a fresh chat on each assistant

   Use ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google, and look at the AI Overview when one shows up. Start a new chat each time, so earlier questions don't steer the answer. If you're logged in, results can lean toward your own history, so a private window gives a cleaner read.

3. 03

   Ask each question twice

   Ask it once, then again in a new chat. Answers shift between runs, so two different answers tell you the result isn't stable yet.

4. 04

   Write down who gets named

   Record every business the assistant lists, in order, and whether you're one of them. Note if it's wrong about you: the wrong phone number, the wrong town, a service you don't offer.

5. 05

   Write down the sources

   Perplexity and Google show their links. ChatGPT and Gemini often do when they search the web. Note which sites keep showing up: directories, review sites, the competitor's own pages.

6. 06

   Put it in one table

   One row per question, one column per assistant, a tick if you were named. That's your baseline. Save it with the date.

What should you look at in the answers?

Naming is only the first thing. Four things in the answers tell you where to work.

In our case the sources that kept showing up were directories and review sites such as Clutch, The Manifest, DesignRush and Yelp, plus a handful of local agencies' own sites. That told us where to put our time.

Can your site be read by AI crawlers at all?

If your robots.txt blocks the crawlers, the assistants can't read your pages, and the check above will keep coming back empty. OpenAI lists three crawlers with three different jobs: GPTBot for training, OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User for pages a person asks it to open. Its documentation says to use OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt to manage search opt-outs. Block that one and you've opted out of ChatGPT search.

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see "Disallow: /" under a user agent that matters, or a line naming OAI-SearchBot with a block, ask whoever manages your site to change it. Some website platforms and security plugins add these blocks without telling you. Ours allows all of them, and we keep checking that it stays that way.

How often should you repeat it?

Monthly is enough. That's the rhythm for one owner doing it by hand. Faster than that and you'll be chasing noise. We run our list weekly because software does it for us, and even then we read it as a trend over several weeks, never one result.

Same rule for what you do afterwards. If you fix a profile on Monday and the assistants don't name you by Friday, that doesn't mean it failed. Some changes take a few weeks to show, and answers keep moving, so keep the dated table and compare month to month.

What do you do with the results?

Start with the cheapest fix that the answers point to. Complete the profiles on the sites the assistants keep citing. Fix any wrong details. Add a plain, quotable answer to your own service pages: who you serve, where, what it costs, how long it takes. Then re-run the table next month.

If you'd rather not run this by hand, that's what we do inside our monthly SEO plans. Every plan includes AI answer checks, and we show you the table every month. We built the tools that run Disame Graphics ourselves, including an operations dashboard that tracks every client's rankings, map positions, spend and margin each day. Not sure what a plan costs or who to hire? Read what SEO costs on Long Island and our guide on who to hire for AI search optimization.