Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI mode two questions: who the best firms in your city are, and what they know about yours by name. Record what's inaccurate, not just whether you appear. Being described wrong is more damaging than being absent, because it's confidently wrong and nobody flags it.
The check takes ten minutes and almost nobody runs it
You can check your Google ranking in seconds. There is no equivalent for "what does ChatGPT say about my firm," so most owners have simply never looked — not out of neglect, but because there's no dashboard prompting them to.
Here's the whole procedure.
Open three engines in three tabs. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google with AI mode on. Add Claude or Gemini if you want a fuller picture. Use a logged-out or incognito session where you can, so personalization doesn't flatter the result.
Ask the discovery question first. Phrase it the way a prospect would, not the way you'd describe yourself:
"Who are the best estate planning attorneys in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina?" "I need a fee-only financial advisor near Charleston. Who should I talk to?" "Which CPA firms in Summerville do advisory work, not just tax prep?"
Note whether you're named. Note who is named — that list is your real competitive set in AI search, and it's often not the same firms you compete with on Google.
Then ask the identity question. By name:
"Tell me about [your firm name] in [your city]."
This is the more revealing of the two.
Record what's wrong, not just whether you appear
Absence is a problem you can work on. Being described wrongly is worse, because the engine states it with the same confidence it states everything else, and no one is going to email you about it.
Look for:
- Wrong practice areas. An estate firm described as doing personal injury.
- Wrong or stale people. Attorneys who left. A founder who retired.
- Missing differentiators. For a fee-only advisor, the absence of "fee-only" and "fiduciary" is the whole ballgame — you're being filed alongside the firms you define yourself against.
- Wrong location. A neighboring city, or a merged identity with a similarly named firm elsewhere.
- Invented specifics. Awards you don't have, years in business that are wrong, staff counts from nowhere.
- Confusion with another firm. Common with generic names, and the hardest to unwind.
Write these down verbatim, with the date and which engine said it. Not a summary — the actual sentence. You'll want the wording later, and answers change between sessions.
Run it more than once
Generative answers are non-deterministic. The same question in the same engine an hour later can return different firms. One run is an anecdote; three runs across a week is a baseline.
This cuts both ways. If you appear once out of three, you're not "in" — you're occasionally surfaced. And if a competitor appears three out of three, they've become the default answer, which is a much stronger position than a ranking.
Why the answers are what they are
Three causes account for most of what you'll find, in rough order of frequency.
Your site says nothing an engine can attribute to you. Copy that reads well and asserts nothing specific — "trusted partner," "tailored solutions," "client-focused approach" — gives a retrieval system nothing to lift. Named credentials, jurisdictions, dates, and numbers get quoted. Adjectives don't.
Your identity contradicts itself across the web. Directory listings with an old address. A LinkedIn description that doesn't match your homepage. A previous firm name still live somewhere. When an engine can't determine which version of you is correct, it picks whichever it trusts most — which may not be yours.
The crawlers were blocked and nobody knew. This is the one people assume they'd have noticed. They wouldn't. It's covered in its own post.
What you can and can't conclude
Verified — What each engine said, on the date you asked. That's a direct observation and you have the transcript.
Unconfirmed — Why it said that. You're seeing output, not the retrieval path. Whether a wrong description came from a stale directory listing, from a competitor's page that mentions you, from a training-data artifact, or from your own site's ambiguity is not visible from the answer itself. Tracing it back requires checking your off-site footprint, your schema graph, and your crawler access — and even then, some of it stays inference. Anyone who tells you with certainty why an engine said something specific is overstating.
Do this before you spend anything
The value of this check isn't that it fixes something. It's that it converts an anxiety into a written record. Ten minutes and a document with dates, engines, and exact wording puts you ahead of nearly every firm in your market — most of whom have never looked.
If the engines describe you wrongly and you can't tell why, that's the honest limit of a self-check. See the full symptom map at how do I tell if my website is losing me clients, or read what an AI-visibility check actually covers on the GEO audit page.