You can find out whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity recommend your business in about half an hour, with no tools and no budget. Write ten questions a real customer would ask, put each one to all four engines, and write down four things every time. This post walks through it, question by question.
Most business owners have never checked. That's understandable: there's no "ranking" to look up, and asking once gives you one answer out of many possible ones. But a careful half-hour test tells you far more than a guess does. It also gives you a baseline, so next month you'll know whether anything you changed made a difference.
Before you start: switch off the things that skew the answer
AI assistants remember you. If you've spent months asking ChatGPT about your own business, it may mention you simply because you've mentioned yourself. That tells you nothing about what a stranger sees.
- Use a private or incognito browser window, and stay logged out where the engine allows it.
- If you must be logged in, turn off memory or personalisation in the settings first, or start a temporary chat.
- Don't name your business in the question. Customers don't know your name yet. That's the point.
- Start a new chat for every question, so an earlier answer doesn't colour the next one.
Step 1: Write ten questions your customers actually ask
Engines handle different kinds of question differently, so mix them. Aim for roughly this split:
- Four "who's best" questions. "Who's a good bookkeeper for a small business in Durban?" These are the ones that turn into enquiries.
- Three specific-need questions. "Which Pretoria accountant understands construction companies and VAT?" Smaller businesses often win here even when they lose the broad ones.
- Two price or comparison questions. "How much does a monthly bookkeeping service cost in South Africa?" and "[Competitor] vs other options?"
- One "what is" question about you, the only one that names you: "What is [your business]?" It shows whether the engine knows what you do and gets it right.
Write them the way people type or speak, including the town or suburb. "Plumber" and "emergency plumber in Centurion open on Sunday" are different searches with different winners.
Step 2: Ask all four engines, and write down four things
Put each question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Ten questions on four engines is forty answers, which is about thirty minutes if you keep moving. For each answer, record:
| Record | What to write | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Mentioned? | Yes / No | The basic test. If you're not named, you weren't in the running. |
| Position | 1st, 2nd … or "last in a list" | People mostly contact the first one or two names. |
| Accurate? | Right services, area and price, or what was wrong | A wrong price or an old address can cost you the enquiry anyway. |
| Linked to | Your site, a directory, a competitor's list, or nothing | Shows which page the engine trusted, and whether it was yours. |
Also note which competitors keep coming up. After forty answers the same three or four names usually repeat. They're who you're really up against in AI search, and they aren't always the ones you'd guess.
Step 3: Read the pattern, not a single answer
AI answers change from one ask to the next, even with identical wording. One mention, or one miss, proves little. Read across the whole sheet:
- Mentioned by Perplexity but not ChatGPT? Perplexity reads live web pages and links to them, so your site is readable. ChatGPT often answers from what it learned in training, which means not enough independent sites talked about you before its cut-off. The fix is getting mentioned elsewhere: local press, industry bodies, directories and reviews.
- Named but never linked? The engine knows of you but couldn't use your page as a source. Check that your site doesn't depend on JavaScript to show its text, and that robots.txt doesn't block AI crawlers.
- Win the specific questions, lose the broad ones? That's normal for a smaller business, and it's useful. Build a page for each specific thing you win on and make it the clearest answer online.
- Wrong facts? Look for where the wrong version lives: an old page, a directory listing, a Google Business Profile nobody updated. Engines repeat the version they find most often.
- Never mentioned at all? Start with the basics. Can an engine even read your website? The free Prospectus Checkup runs five structural checks on any domain in about a minute.
Step 4: Do it again next month, with the same questions
The questions only become a measurement if you keep them fixed. Keep the sheet, re-run the same ten each month, and compare: how many of the forty answers named you, how often you came first, and how many facts were right. Change one thing at a time, such as adding an FAQ page or fixing a directory listing, so you can tell which change moved the number.
If thirty minutes a month becomes the thing that never gets done, that's what Monitor is for. It runs a monthly AI visibility check across up to 25 real buyer-intent searches and tracks two competitors alongside you (R1,450/month).
What this test can't tell you
Being honest about the limits matters. This test can't tell you how many people asked an AI about your category this month, because no AI company publishes that. It can't guarantee tomorrow's answer either: the models change and so do their sources. What it gives you is a fair, repeatable reading of whether you're in the conversation, and whether you're gaining or losing ground over time.
Common questions
Do I need to pay for ChatGPT Plus or other paid plans to run this?
No. Most of your customers use the free versions, so the free versions are the fairer test.
Why not ask one engine lots of times instead of four engines once?
Because customers are spread across engines, and the engines disagree. You'll learn more from the differences between them than from repeating one.
How many times should I ask each question?
Once each for your baseline. If a result surprises you, ask that question two more times in fresh chats before you act on it.
Is it a problem that my competitor shows up and I don't?
It tells you where to look. Open the page the engine linked to for them, see what it states that yours doesn't, and write the clearer, more honest version.
Automating this instead of doing it by hand.
CAI Systems maps what a South African business actually does, automates the repeatable parts, and runs an AI agent on its own WhatsApp number. If something here is work you keep redoing, have us test your response time first — it costs nothing.