How to check whether ChatGPT and Google mention your business

To find out whether ChatGPT or Google mention your business, ask them the questions the way a customer would, one by one, with web search turned on, and write down whether they name you, whether the details are correct and which pages they cite as sources. It is a manual test that takes twenty minutes. And one warning up front: no test, no agency and no trick can guarantee that an assistant will cite you.

What you can check and what you can’t

What you can see is a snapshot: what an assistant answered to one specific question, right now. What you can’t see is the exact reason it named you, or didn’t. In the official documentation we reviewed for this article, none of these companies promises you will appear, so anyone who sells it to you as certain is guessing.

The official documentation does give an honest starting point. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in its AI answers: your page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, and even when everything is met, Google states that indexing and serving are not guaranteed. Perplexity, for its part, recommends allowing its crawler in robots.txt so your site can appear in its results, but that is a recommendation, not a promise. On that basis, the sensible move is to measure where you stand and fix what does depend on you.

The twenty-minute test, step by step

Step 1: write five questions the way your customer would say them

Don’t use your business name in all of them, because that only proves you exist. Mix questions where the customer doesn’t yet know who you are with ones where they already search for you by name. Write them in Spanish, in the words your customers actually use:

• One for discovery: “where is there a good [your type of business] in [your neighborhood or city]”.
• One for proximity: “[your type of business] near [a well-known landmark in your area]”.
• One for price: “how much does [your main service] cost in [your city]”.
• One for facts: “what time does [your business] open” or “where is [your business]”.
• One for trust: “what do people say about [your business]”.

Step 2: ask them in three places

Run the same five questions in ChatGPT with web search turned on, in Google (look for an AI answer above the results and try AI Mode too) and in Perplexity. If you can, do it logged out or in a private window; if not, make a note of it, because an assistant might take your history into account.

Step 3: write everything down in a table

Without a table there is no way to compare anything next week. This one is enough:

Step 4: repeat with different words and on another day

An answer can come out different from one query to the next, so a single test proves nothing. Change the word order, use the neighborhood name instead of the city, and test again in a few days. If you show up once out of five, that is information; if you never show up, that is information too.

Read the sources they cite, not just the answer

The answer is what the customer sees, but the pages an assistant cites tell you where it gets its information about your business. Google explains that its AI features show links to sites that support the answer, and Perplexity describes its crawler as the one that surfaces and links websites in its results. Check whether your details come from your own page, from your Google listing, from a directory or from a third party’s article.

If an assistant says you are open until eight when you close at seven, find out where it got that. It may be an old detail somewhere you forgot to update, and the fix starts there, not in the assistant. The same goes for the phone or WhatsApp number: if the answer shows one you no longer use, trace it back to its source.

If you don’t show up, check this in order

Four checks, from the cheapest to the deepest. None guarantees a result, but all of them remove real obstacles.

• That you are not blocking the crawlers. Your robots.txt file can stop bots from visiting. OpenAI documents separate crawlers: OAI-SearchBot, used for search; GPTBot, used to train models; and ChatGPT-User, which acts when a person asks for it. According to OpenAI, sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, although they can still appear as navigational links. Google, for its part, requires that Googlebot is not blocked. Blocking GPTBot is a different decision, about training, and it is not the same as blocking search.
• That your page is indexed. With the URL Inspection tool in Search Console you can see whether Google can access it and whether it responds properly. It is the minimum requirement for almost everything else.
• That your details match everywhere. The name, address, phone number and opening hours on your page must be the same as on your Google listing.
• That your page says clearly what you are. Real text, not just images, and a complete structured-data profile.

On the first point, a piece of context: in a review of 330 local-business websites, only 6 of the 285 readable robots.txt files blocked any of the four AI bots we measured. Review of 330 local-business websites in Guadalajara, Querétaro and Monterrey, 20 Oct 2026. Basic signals from the home page; does not measure rankings. We don’t know whether those blocks were a decision or a setting inherited from the hosting provider, so check yours.

How to keep track without obsessing

Repeat the test once a month with the same five questions and keep the table. With three months of records you can tell whether anything changed after you fixed your details, instead of relying on an impression.

For your page on Google, Search Console is the tool that reports your performance in the search engine. According to Google’s own documentation, traffic from its AI features is counted within overall search traffic and shows up in the Performance report, under the “Web” search type.