Start with a buying decision.
Choose questions from sales conversations and customer enquiries. Include the offer, customer type, location where relevant, and a constraint that affects the purchase.
Use questions that do not name your business alongside direct comparisons. “What does our company do?” tests something different from a buyer asking whom to choose.
Keep the wording fixed across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. Record the product, mode, date, region and whether web search ran. Repeat on another date before treating a difference as a pattern.
Keep the answer with the evidence.
Separate an absent brand, a passing mention and an explicit recommendation. Save the actual answer, competitor names, factual errors and visible citation links.
Open those links. Does each page support the relevant claim? The citations are inspectable evidence; they do not reveal every reason the platform selected its answer.
A comparison log you can use
Blank fields for prompts, answers, sources and next actions.
Can the relevant platform access your content?
| Surface | What to check |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | OAI-SearchBot concerns search; GPTBot concerns training. The controls are independent. OpenAI documentation |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot supports search, not foundation-model training. Check robots rules and access from published IP ranges. Perplexity documentation |
| Claude | Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User and ClaudeBot cover search, user retrieval and training collection respectively. Anthropic documentation |
| Gemini | Google-Extended controls both Gemini training and grounding. Do not assume this token separates the two uses. Google documentation |
| Google Search AI features | AI Overviews and AI Mode use Search requirements: a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet. No special AI file or schema is required. Google Search guidance |
Ask your website owner to inspect actual page availability, robots rules and relevant firewall logs. Access alone does not guarantee a recommendation.
Choose a fix you can explain.
Add missing, accurate information about fit, services, locations or limitations. Request legitimate corrections to outdated listings. Drop questions that describe customers you do not serve.
Record the evidence, proposed change, owner and review date. Our Perplexity answer walkthrough shows how to inspect two different kinds of cited page.
Bring the question you want to understand.
Share your website and an AI answer that prompted a question. Start with the evidence and the business decision behind it.
Talk about your visibility