How to find out what ChatGPT recommends in your niche, and get on the list
Buyers now ask an assistant before they search. Here is how to ask the same questions they do, read the answers honestly, find the sources the assistants trust, and earn a place in the shortlist without tricks.
A growing share of buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity "who should I use for X" before they open Google. The answer is a shortlist of three to five names. If you are on it, you get a lead that never saw an ad. If you are not, you never find out. This guide shows how to measure where you stand, and what actually moves the answer.
Step 1: ask what your buyers ask
Do not ask "is Harbour Dental good". Nobody asks that. Ask the questions a buyer types when they do not know you exist.
| Bad question | Good question |
|---|---|
| Is Harbour Dental a good dentist | Best dentist in Parramatta for a nervous adult |
| What do people think of Kestrel Supply | Where can a small cafe buy compostable cups in bulk in Australia |
| Does Brightline Software have good reviews | Simplest scheduling software for a five-person cleaning company |
Write ten of these. Vary them: a couple general, a couple with a location, a couple with a constraint like price or speed, a couple phrased as a problem rather than a product. Keep them neutral. A question that contains your brand name measures nothing.
Step 2: ask all four, with search on
The four assistants read the web differently and cite different sources, so one is not a proxy for the rest. Ask each question in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity with web search turned on, because that is how buyers use them.
For every answer, write down three things:
- Named. Which businesses were recommended by name.
- Cited. Which web pages the assistant linked or said it read.
- Wrong. Anything it said about you or a competitor that is not true.
Forty answers takes about two hours by hand the first time, and less once you have the questions and the spreadsheet set up. The first manual run is worth doing carefully so you believe the numbers.
Step 3: read the results honestly
Two numbers matter, and they are not the same.
| Number | What it means | What it is not |
|---|---|---|
| Recommended | The assistant put your name in the shortlist | Being mentioned in passing ("unlike Harbour Dental, which focuses on...") |
| Cited | The assistant read one of your pages while answering | A recommendation. Assistants cite pages they disagree with too. |
A business can be cited and never recommended. That usually means your pages are readable but say nothing an assistant can repeat: no prices, no service list, no location, no proof.
The third thing to read is the sources. Every answer leans on a handful of pages: directories, "best of" lists, review sites, industry bodies, and competitors' own blogs. List every cited domain across all forty answers and count them. In our own test for the competitor monitoring category, two thirds of the cited sources were competitor-owned blogs. The remaining third is your outreach list.
Step 4: fix what is on your own site
The assistants can only repeat what they can read. Most small business sites fail this in the same six ways.
| Missing | Fix |
|---|---|
| No plain statement of what you do and for whom | One sentence on the homepage: "Harbour Dental is a family dentist in Parramatta for anxious adults and children." |
| No prices | A pricing page, even if it says "from". Assistants love a number they can quote. |
| No location | Address, suburbs served, and a map page. "Australia" is not a location. |
| No proof | Review count and rating on the page, in text, not only in a widget. |
| No answers | A questions page that answers the ten questions from step 1 in your words. |
| Blocked crawlers | A robots file that bans AI crawlers keeps you out of every answer. Check it. |
None of this is a trick. It is the same page work that makes a site rank, written so a machine can quote it.
Step 5: get onto the pages they read
Take the source list from step 3 and split it.
- Directories and review sites (Google Business Profile, industry directories, Trustpilot, G2 and Capterra for software). Claim the listing, keep an eye on the reviews, fill every field, keep the description identical to your homepage sentence.
- "Best of" lists and roundups on independent sites. Write to the author with one honest paragraph and a link to your questions page. Most never reply. Some do.
- Competitor-owned blogs. Skip them. They will never list you.
- Communities like Reddit. Watch the threads in your category and answer real questions there over months. Do not drop links.
Step 6: measure every week, on the same questions
The mistake is changing the questions. Keep the same ten, ask the same four assistants, count recommended and cited, and log it. Movement shows up after four to eight weeks. If you change the questions you cannot tell whether you moved or the test did.
The Figo way
Figo watches the rest of your competitors' marketing every week, their rankings and traffic, new pages and blog posts, pricing, ads, social posts and reviews, and write it up in a plain Monday briefing. Run the ten questions by hand alongside it, log the results in the same spreadsheet each week, and you have the full picture: what your competitors changed, and whether the assistants noticed. See what the briefing looks like, or read how the data is collected.
Questions people ask
Do the assistants give the same answer every time?
No. Ask the same question twice and you get different wording and sometimes a different shortlist. That is why you ask several questions, ask all four assistants, and repeat weekly. One answer is an anecdote. Forty are a measurement.
Can I pay to be recommended?
Not inside the answer itself. OpenAI's pricing page now says some ChatGPT plans may show ads, but an ad is labelled and separate from who the answer recommends. Being named still comes from being present and consistent on the pages the assistants read.
Does this replace SEO?
No, it sits on top of it. The assistants read the web through search, so the pages that rank are the pages they see. Good pages that answer real questions do both jobs.
How long until it changes?
Weeks, not days. Directory listings and new pages have to be crawled and then read. Expect the first movement four to eight weeks after the changes, and measure on the same questions every week so you can see it.
See it on your own competitors
Figo checks their ads, pages, rankings and reviews every week, then tells you what to do in plain words. Set up in two minutes.
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