How to test whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini know your company

Why one check is not enough

AI answers are not stable. SparkToro ran 2,961 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI, each repeated many times, and found less than a 1% chance of getting the same list of brands twice. Parse found the top recommendation changed in 43.6% of 161,023 consecutive answers to the same prompt. A single screenshot tells you what happened once.

This test covers the discovery side of founder presence. It is worth running alongside a plainer check: what a buyer finds on the founder's profile and the company site.

Step 1: write the question set

Use three groups. Write them the way a buyer would, not the way your marketing would.

Fifteen to 25 questions is enough. Take them from sales calls and support tickets where you can.

Step 2: decide which assistants

Test the ones your buyers use. A common set is ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews or AI Mode. Add Claude or Copilot if your buyers work in environments where those are standard.

The engines behave differently. Perplexity shows its sources by default. ChatGPT cites sources when it searches. Google's AI features appear within search results and link to pages. Record which mode you used.

Step 3: run each question several times

Use a logged-out or clean session where possible, so personal history does not influence answers. Run each question 3 to 5 times per assistant. For a deeper study, run more and change the persona slightly ("I'm a CTO at a fintech company...") because answers can shift with the role described.

Step 4: record the same fields every time

• Date and time
• Assistant and mode (search on or off)
• Exact question wording
• Company named? Yes or no, and position if a list
• Founder named?
• How the company is described, copied verbatim
• Errors: wrong category, old pricing, wrong founder, confused with another company
• Sources cited, with URLs

A spreadsheet is enough.

A filled example: OwnedSignal, 3 October 2026

These rows come from the baseline OwnedSignal ran on itself on 3 October 2026, two days after changing its positioning, so the date column is left out. An automated research agent ran them with two search tools, a web-search API that writes an AI summary and Exa, not with ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini. They show the format and the kind of errors to look for, not those assistants' answers.

None of the web-search API rows linked to ownedsignal.com. The second row matters as much as the first: the same wrong answer twice is a stable problem, not noise. The third shows a different failure, an index that has not caught up with a change.

Step 5: read the results

Look for patterns across runs, not single answers:

• Not known at all on direct questions: usually a crawl access or entity clarity problem.
• Known but described wrongly: inconsistent descriptions across your site and profiles, or old pages ranking.
• Known but absent from category answers: you lack pages that answer category questions, or third-party sources do not mention you.
• Present but positioned poorly: third-party sources describe you in terms you would not choose.

The cited sources are often the most useful part. They show which pages the assistant trusts for your category, which tells you where to be present.

Step 6: track how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini describe your company over time

Run the same set monthly or quarterly with the same method. Change the question set rarely, and log it when you do. Over time you get a distribution of outcomes, which is far more reliable than one run. How to turn the runs into measures, such as mention rate, description accuracy and cited sources, is covered in how to measure AI visibility.

A note on tools

Several vendors sell AI visibility tracking. They automate the runs, which helps at scale. Ask how many runs they use per question, whether they show the raw answers, and how they handle variation. A report that gives you a single "rank" for an AI answer does not reflect how these systems behave.

If you would rather have a first check done for you, the Founder Presence Sprint includes a first look at how search and AI assistants describe you for 5 buyer questions.