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Manual test

Check if ChatGPT recommends your product

You can do this in an afternoon with four free products and a notes file. You will see the wording a buyer might see today. You will not get a rank, and the wording will move.

Write the question a buyer would type

The useful prompt does not contain your product name. It contains the job and a constraint. A prompt that already says your name only tells you whether the assistant has heard of you. A buyer who has not heard of you never types that.

Write five to ten category prompts, plus one brand prompt that you keep in its own row. Use the words your buyers use. These are prompts to try, not results anyone observed:

  • Newsletter: “simple newsletter tool for a solo creator who sends once a week”
  • Podcast: “how to schedule podcast guests without a long email thread”
  • Scheduling: “scheduling page for a consultant who only wants a few slots a week”
  • Forms: “form tool that can take payment for a small workshop”
  • Courses: “course platform for one paid cohort”
  • Membership: “membership software for a paid newsletter with a few hundred people”
  • Creative tool: “lightweight [your category] for a one-person studio”
  • Brand, separate row: “What is [your product]?”

If you only run the brand prompt, you will think you show up more often than a stranger would find you.

Ask it in four places, same words, same day

Keep one row per surface. Do not blend them into a single “AI said.”

  1. ChatGPT

    Go to chatgpt.com. If the product offers a web search, use it for this test. The label for that control has changed before, so look for an answer that shows sources rather than hunting for one button name. Write down whether sources appeared.

    OpenAI separates search from a person asking the model to open a page. Its crawler docs say OAI-SearchBot is what surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User is for some user-triggered visits. A buyer prompt with no URL is the search case. Pasting your homepage and asking “would you recommend this?” is a different test.

  2. Perplexity

    Ask the same sentence at perplexity.ai. Copy every source URL the answer shows. Perplexity’s crawler docs say PerplexityBot is the agent they use to surface and link sites in search results.

  3. Gemini

    Ask it in the Gemini app at gemini.google.com. That is a different product from the AI Overview on a Google results page. Give it its own row. Google’s site-owner documentation for AI answers inside Search is about AI Overviews and AI Mode, not a crawler named after the Gemini app.

  4. Google

    Search the exact prompt on Google. If an AI Overview is on the page, record the links inside it. If it is not, write “no AI Overview.” Google says AI Overviews are shown when their systems decide an overview adds something beyond the regular results, and that they often do not trigger. A missing overview is a normal outcome, not a broken test.

Three labels, used the same way every time

Cited
Your product or your URL is named as a recommendation, or it is one of the source links.
Mentioned
Your name appears. You are not the recommendation, and you are not a source.
Absent
Your name and your URL do not appear.

Also write who was named, and the page the answer pointed at. If that page is a roundup, open it. The assistant often repeated a list that already existed. That page is the thing to read. The next guide covers why that happens.

An answer with no sources is still data: you were named, or you were not. It is a different kind of data from an answer that cites a URL. Mark the row either way. Do not upgrade a mention into a citation because the paragraph sounded friendly.

A blank row

Copy this shape into a note. Leave the cells empty until you have looked. Do not fill them from memory.
Prompt Surface Sources shown? Your label Named instead Page they used
Buyer question, exact wording ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google Yes, no, or no AI Overview Cited, mentioned, or absent Names, or “none” URL, or “none”

How to keep the check honest

  • Log out, or use a private window, if your account has memory or custom instructions about your company. That removes one bias. It does not make the answer the answer. These products personalize, and they change.
  • Record the first answer. Refreshing until your name appears is a different experiment. Write that down if you do it.
  • Screenshot or copy the text. A paraphrase will quietly turn “mentioned” into “cited.”
  • Note the date and the country you searched from. One afternoon is a spot check. Averaging it with a check you do next month is not a trend.
  • Use the same wording on every surface. A “cleaner” rephrase is a new prompt.

What you can conclude

You can say what these four surfaces showed, for these prompts, on this day, from the place you searched. You cannot say that you rank in AI, that a rewrite will get you cited, or that a competitor’s presence is permanent.

Google’s Generative AI performance report in Search Console counts impressions: how many times a link to your site was shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode. It does not show you the sentence, and it does not cover ChatGPT or Perplexity. The notes file is still how you see the wording. Google’s AI features guide also says those appearances are included in the ordinary Performance report, under the Web search type, mixed with the rest of search traffic.

Next: why a competitor gets named, or what Google says about AI Overviews.

Sources