Most business owners have never typed their own company name into ChatGPT. They have Googled themselves plenty of times, watched the ranking, checked the reviews. The assistant sitting on their phone that a growing number of their buyers now ask first has never been tested.
That is worth fixing before it costs you an enquiry. Here are the five questions worth asking, in the order that tells you the most.
One: “What does [your company] do?”
Start with the plain version. Ask the assistant to describe your business, nothing else. This is the baseline check on accuracy.
Read the answer against what you would actually say if a stranger asked you the same thing. Does it name the right services? Does it place you in the right sector? Does it miss the thing you are actually known for and lead with something minor instead?
A wrong or thin answer here is not a mystery. It usually means your own website never states the fact plainly, in one place, in language a machine can lift cleanly.
Two: “Who is the best [your service] provider in [your area]?”
This is the question your buyers are actually asking, phrased the way they would phrase it. Swap in the real service and the real town or region.
If you appear, note who else is named alongside you and in what order. If you do not appear, note exactly who does. That list is your real competitive set for AI search, and it will not always match who you think of as your competitors on Google.
Three: “What do customers say about [your company]?”
This tests whether the assistant can find and trust anything specific about your reputation, not just your own marketing copy.
A confident answer here usually draws on reviews, case studies with real detail, or press mentions. A vague or empty answer suggests your proof points live somewhere an assistant cannot read easily, or do not exist in a citable form at all.
Four: “How much does [your service] cost?”
Pricing questions are blunt and revealing. Some assistants will give a rough figure if it is published anywhere findable. Others will say they cannot find pricing information and suggest you contact the business directly.
Neither answer is wrong to have, but you should know which one your business gets. A buyer asking this question is close to a decision, and “contact us to find out” is a weaker answer than a clear indicative range, even a broad one.
Five: “Compare [your company] to [a named competitor]”
This is the sharpest test and the one most owners avoid, understandably. Pick a competitor you genuinely compete against and ask the assistant to compare you.
The comparison tells you what the assistant considers your points of difference, if it has any confident answer at all. If it cannot compare you meaningfully, that is a gap. If the comparison favours the competitor on points you would dispute, that is a correction worth making, starting with your own content.
What to do with the answers
None of these five questions require a tool or a budget. They require ten minutes and the willingness to read an honest answer about your own business, which is not always comfortable.
Once you have the five answers, the pattern usually falls into one of two camps. Either the facts are broadly right and thin, which means the fix is adding clear, citable detail. Or the facts are wrong or absent, which means the fix starts with correcting the record on your own site and the profiles that feed it.
We run this same exercise, systematically and across more assistants and questions than most owners have time for, as the first step of every AI Visibility Audit. It is not complicated work. It is work that almost nobody has done yet, which is exactly why doing it now is worth something.
If you would rather see what a full pass turns up, the audit is a proper piece of work and you keep the findings either way.
