Rankavex

Manual test

How do you test whether ChatGPT can read your site?

Ask it directly, and compare the answer to the actual page — that's the whole test, and it takes about five minutes with no tool required. What takes longer, and matters more, is not trusting the first answer you get: these tools shift with phrasing, with the session, and month to month, so one try mostly tells you that you're fine.

# Prompt 1 — direct, branded
"What does [yourcompany] charge for [specific plan]?"
Answers correctly, cites your pricing page

# Prompt 2 — same fact, unbranded
"What's a good [category] tool for [specific use case]?"
Names three competitors, not you

The gap between these two prompts is the actual finding. Most people only ever run the first one.

Run the same five steps in ChatGPT, then again in Claude or Perplexity if you have access. Do it from a fresh chat each time — carried-over context changes the answer.

  1. Ask a branded question you know the answer to: "What does [your product] do?" or "How much is [your plan]?" This confirms the assistant can find and identify you at all.
  2. Ask the same question a second time, worded differently. If the two answers disagree with each other, that's already the finding — consistency is part of what's being tested.
  3. Ask an unbranded, category-level question a prospect would actually type: "best tool for [use case]," "how do I [problem you solve]." Note whether you're named, and who is named instead.
  4. When a competitor is named and you aren't, open the page it cites. Read it as a checklist against your own page: does it state a direct answer near the top, does it have working structured data, is it something a crawler can actually reach.
  5. Repeat the unbranded question a few days later. If the result moved without you changing anything, that instability is the real number — not either single answer.

None of this replaces the technical audit — a page can be well written and still be invisible because of one blocked crawler or one missing schema field, which this test won't show you. It's the fast way to know whether the deeper check is worth running at all.

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Sources

Cite this

Ask it directly, and compare the answer to the actual page — that's the whole test. What matters more is not trusting the first answer: these tools shift with phrasing, with the session, and month to month.

Igor Almeida, Rankavex. Last updated 2026-08-26
https://rankavex.com/checks/how-to-test-ai-visibility/

All five checks, in order →