When someone asks ChatGPT "who is the best caterer in Quebec City?", they don't get ten links. They get an answer, with two or three names. So the question becomes: is yours one of them?
No generative engine offers a dashboard like Google's Search Console yet. You have to measure it yourself. The good news: one hour a month is enough to get a reliable picture.
Step 1: list the real questions
Start from the questions your customers actually ask, not from the keywords on your site. Go through your emails, your calls, the questions asked in store. Aim for 20 to 30 questions, phrased the way a person would type them.
- Discovery questions: "which agency should redo my website in Sherbrooke?"
- Comparison questions: "X or Y for an accountant in Laval?"
- Questions about you: "does [your business] deliver outside Montreal?"
Step 2: test every month in four assistants
Ask each question in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot, in a private window or logged out, to limit the effect of your history. Answers vary from one try to the next: ask the important questions two or three times.
For each answer, note in a spreadsheet: are you named, are you cited with a link, in what position, and is the information correct. An answer that names you with the wrong price or the wrong hours is a problem to fix first.
Step 3: look at the visits coming from AI
In your analytics tool, filter traffic sources. Visits from assistants arrive with referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com or copilot.microsoft.com. ChatGPT also often adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it suggests.
Volumes are still modest for most sites, but the trend matters more than the number. If the curve goes up month after month, your efforts are paying off.
Step 4: check that AI crawlers can get in
An assistant can't cite a page it isn't allowed to read. Check your robots.txt file and, if you have access, your server logs. The names to look for: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for OpenAI, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, and Googlebot for Gemini and Google's AI Overviews.
An overzealous firewall or anti-bot service sometimes blocks these visitors without anyone knowing. It is one of the most common causes of invisibility, and one of the easiest to fix.
What you will have after three months
A clear picture: which questions you show up for, which ones a competitor owns, and what the AI gets wrong about you. It's the foundation of any GEO work, and it's free.