Someone in Cary asks an assistant for a good electrician, or a dentist open Saturday, or a caterer for sixty people. The assistant answers in two seconds. Either your business is in that answer, described correctly, or it is not.
Most owners have never looked. That is the first problem, and it is easy to fix. This post walks through how to check if ChatGPT knows your business, what to write down, and what to do about the errors you find.
Why check before you change anything?
Because you cannot measure progress without a starting line.
Plenty of businesses jump straight to "optimizing for AI search" and then have no idea whether anything improved. Worse, they spend effort fixing things that were never broken.
An audit takes about an hour. It tells you three things:
- Whether assistants know you exist at all
- What they get wrong
- Which wrong facts are worth fixing first
One honest caveat up front. This audit is a starting point. It will not guarantee a mention, and nothing we or anyone else can do will. What it gives you is a clear list of problems you actually control.
Which prompts should you run?
Keep the list short and make it match how a customer would really ask. Run these, swapping in your own business name, trade and town:
- "What is [Business Name] in [City, NC]?"
- "What are the hours for [Business Name] in [City]?"
- "What services does [Business Name] offer?"
- "What areas does [Business Name] serve?"
- "Who are the best [your trade] in [City] or the Triangle?"
- "Recommend a [your trade] near [neighborhood] for [a specific job]."
- "What do customers say about [Business Name]?"
The first four test whether the assistant knows your facts. The last three test whether it recommends you when nobody has typed your name. Number five and six are the ones that matter most for new customers, and the ones where you will probably be absent. That is normal.
Run them in ChatGPT and in Google's AI answers at minimum. If your customers use another assistant, add it.
Why run each prompt more than once?
Because the answers change. Ask the same question twice and you may get two different lists, two different phrasings, sometimes two different facts.
So one run proves nothing. Run each prompt at least three times, ideally on different days. Start a fresh chat each time so earlier answers do not color later ones.
Look for patterns, not single results. A wrong closing time that shows up in all three runs is a real problem. A wrong detail that appears once is noise worth noting but not worth panic.
This is also why we will not promise you a specific outcome from any of this. The systems are not static, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
How do you record the answers?
A spreadsheet is plenty. One row per prompt per run. Columns:
- Date and assistant used
- The exact prompt
- Whether your business was mentioned
- Facts stated (hours, services, service area, phone, address)
- Facts that were wrong or missing
- Which competitors were named instead
Paste the full answer into a notes column too. You will want the original wording later.
Take a screenshot if you like, but text is easier to compare. The point is that in three months you can put two rows side by side and see what changed, instead of trusting your memory.
Highlight every wrong fact in red. That red list becomes your to-do list.
What does a wrong or missing answer usually mean?
Sort what you find into three buckets.
Wrong facts. The assistant knows you but states old hours, a service you dropped or a town you do not cover. Somewhere, a source says that, or sources disagree and the assistant picked one.
Vague answers. It describes you in generic terms, or says it does not have specific information. Usually your online footprint is thin or inconsistent.
Absent. It names competitors and skips you. This is the most common result for the "best in the Triangle" prompts, and it is not a verdict on your quality. It means the assistant did not find enough clear evidence about you.
In every case the fix starts the same way. Find where the information lives, and make it consistent.
Where do wrong hours, services and areas come from?
We cannot see inside any assistant, so treat this as likely, not certain. But errors tend to trace back to the same places:
- Your website. An old hours page, a services list that never got updated, a footer with a previous address.
- Your Google Business Profile. Holiday hours that never reverted, a category that no longer fits, a service area set years ago.
- Directories and listings. Yelp, Yellow Pages style sites, chamber of commerce pages and industry directories that copied your details once and never updated.
- Old press and social posts. A news mention from your first year, with details that are no longer true.
When two of these disagree, assistants may pick either. Disagreement is the real enemy. A business with one consistent story everywhere is easier to describe correctly.
How do you fix errors on your own website first?
Start with the source you control completely.
Check that your hours, address, phone number and service area appear in plain text, not just inside an image or a PDF. Make sure each service has its own page that says what you do, for whom and where. A page titled "Services" with one vague paragraph gives an assistant very little to work with.
Then read your site the way a stranger would. Does a single page say the towns you serve, by name? Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Apex, Wake Forest, whatever is true for you. If you serve Garner but never say so, do not expect anyone to guess.
If your site is slow or hard to read on a phone, that matters too. Our speed test is a quick way to see where you stand. And if the site structure itself is the obstacle, that is the kind of problem our custom web development work is built to solve.
Which outside profiles should you correct next?
Work in this order:
- Google Business Profile. Fix hours, categories, services, service area and description. This is the highest-value profile for local businesses.
- The big directories. Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook.
- Industry and local listings. Trade associations, the chamber, local guides.
- Old mentions you can edit. Ask the site owner to update stale details.
Use identical wording for your name, address and phone number everywhere. "Suite 100" in one place and "Ste. 100" in another is small, but small mismatches add up across dozens of listings.
Keep a list of every profile you touch and the date you changed it. Updates can take weeks to show up in assistant answers, and some never will until the assistant refreshes what it knows.
If the bigger question is how your whole search presence fits together, that is what our SEO and analytics work covers.
How often should you repeat the audit, and what counts as progress?
Repeat it every quarter. More often than that, and you are just watching noise. Less often, and errors sit there for a year.
Re-run the same prompts, in the same spreadsheet, three times each. Then compare.
Real progress looks like this:
- Fewer wrong facts than last time
- The same correct facts stated consistently across runs
- Your business appearing in at least some of the "recommend a" prompts
- Competitor mentions that no longer crowd you out of the answer
It does not look like a guaranteed number one spot. It looks like a slow shift from wrong to right to present. That is a realistic goal, and it is worth having.
Your next step
Block one hour this week. Run the seven prompts three times each, record the answers, and highlight every wrong fact in red. Then fix the first red item on your own website.
If you would like a second set of eyes on what you find, tell us about your business and bring the spreadsheet.