The short answer: open ChatGPT, ask it the question your customers ask, and see if you're named. If you run a roofing firm in Swansea, type “who's a good roofer in Swansea?” — not your business name — and read the answer. If you're not in it, the buyer who asked never finds out you exist. That's the whole game, and it takes two minutes to check. But before you act on what you see, read on — the manual check has three traps that mislead almost everyone who tries it.
The two-minute manual check
- Ask the way a stranger would. Never use your business name — brand searches find you by definition. Ask what a buyer with a problem types: “emergency plumber Cardiff”, “best accountant for small limited company UK”.
- Check whether web search was actually used. ChatGPT answers some questions from memory and others by searching the web — the answers differ completely. Look for source links or a “searched the web” note.
- Note who is named. If it's not you, it's a competitor or a directory — and they're receiving the customer you paid to be visible for.
The three traps in checking it yourself
Trap one: one question isn't a verdict. AI answers vary run to run and phrasing to phrasing. Being missing from one answer means little; being missing from twelve differently-phrased buyer questions is a pattern you can act on.
Trap two: ChatGPT isn't the only machine. Your buyers also ask Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok, and each one reads the web differently. We regularly see sites cited by one model and invisible to the other four — you can't extrapolate from a single engine.
Trap three: your own chat history leans on the scales. If you've ever told ChatGPT about your business, it may name you out of politeness to you — while telling every real buyer something else. A fair test has to come from a clean seat.
How to check it properly
Two layers, in order. First, the technical layer: can AI models read your site at all? Crawler permissions, structured data, whether your pages answer questions or just describe services. Our free 60-second check scores this across 40+ signals — no signup, and it tells you what's blocking you before you spend a penny.
Second, the citation layer: what do the machines actually say? Our £19 citation audit writes twelve questions the way your real buyers phrase them (read the methodology), runs them live across all five major models from a clean seat — 60 real answers — and shows you exactly who gets recommended, who gets cited, and your share of voice against named competitors.
If you're not in the answers
Don't panic, and don't pay anyone who promises instant citations — engines re-crawl on their own schedules, so citations typically follow fixes by two to four months. The order that works: fix the technical layer first (it's provable the same day), rewrite key pages to answer buyer questions in the first paragraph, then re-run the audit to watch the ✕s turn to ✓s. The fixes are standard web work — your own developer can do them from our report, or Dyfyn Studios can do it for you.