Does AI recommend your business? Test it without fooling yourself

The first thing every owner does is type their business name into ChatGPT. The engine dutifully fetches their website and produces a flattering summary. That feels like visibility. It isn't.

A buyer who already knows your name was never the question. The customers you're losing are the ones who ask, "Which dentist in Oakland is good with anxious patients?" — and hire whoever the answer names. If you're not in that answer, you were never considered.

The contamination problem

When we first built SmartCited, our test prompts mentioned the target brand. The engines obligingly searched for the brand, fetched its site, and cited it — a measurement that manufactures its own result. We had to throw that data out.

The fix is strict: the measurement prompts never contain the brand's name, aliases, domain, phone number, or email. A mention only counts when the engine surfaces the business unprompted, the way it would for a real buyer. We call these unbranded discovery questions, and SmartCited's leakage check rejects any generated question that smuggles the brand in.

How to run the honest test yourself

• Write down ten questions a stranger with your exact problem would ask — service, neighborhood, constraint ("emergency", "affordable", "open Saturday") — with no brand names in them.

• Ask them in ChatGPT (with web search on) and Gemini.

• Record who gets named, and click through the citations to see which pages earned each recommendation.

• Repeat the identical questions later — answers move as the underlying sources change.

What failing looks like

Most local businesses score zero out of ten. That's normal, and it's fixable, because the citations tell you exactly which sources the engines trusted instead of you — competitors' service pages, Yelp profiles, a category directory you're not listed in. Those sources are the to-do list.

SmartCited automates exactly this loop: ten leakage-checked unbranded questions, paired ChatGPT and Gemini answers, every citation retained, and an action plan for the channels you control. An example report shows a full run on a real business — no account needed.