# How do you check if an AI is actually citing you? > A simple self-check reveals whether ChatGPT and Perplexity cite your business correctly — plus the systematic server-side variant. ## The instant test: ask the AI yourself The fastest self-check costs you five minutes and no tools: open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask exactly what a customer would ask — about your services, your location, your opening hours. Then ask directly about your business: "What do you know about [your company]?" Read the answer like someone who doesn't know you yet. Three questions help: - Does your business show up at all, or does the AI only recommend competitors nearby? - What's missing — a service, a detail that sets you apart from others? - What's simply wrong — an old phone number, an outdated opening hour, a service you stopped offering long ago? Repeat the test with two or three different phrasings and on a second AI system. Answers vary from question to question and from system to system — only by comparing them do you spot a pattern instead of a random hit. Note not just what's wrong, but also which source the AI seems to be citing — a map service, an industry directory, your own website. That helps you fix the right spot later instead of tackling everything at once. ## Why checking once isn't enough A single clean answer today says little about where you'll stand in a month, because AI answers shift with every new source that appears online. [How quickly unchanged content loses ground](https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/ai-citation-half-life-forgets-you) is something we've covered in detail elsewhere — the short version: AI systems favor sources that look recognizably current, and what's accurate today can look stale within a few weeks. For your self-check that means: it's not a one-time tick box, but belongs in the same rhythm as your other recurring checks — every few weeks, say, or whenever something changes in your offering. ## The systematic variant: the server-side view Beyond the manual test there's a deeper layer: a look at your own server logs shows in black and white which AI bots actually visit and read your site — not just what a single chat answer happens to repeat. That reveals whether an AI system is regularly pulling your content at all, or whether it's been sitting on outdated data for weeks without you noticing. A modern digital foundation brings this kind of view along by default, instead of you having to piece it together yourself. btlabs Core has exactly that built in as standard: a visibility cockpit that shows which AI systems stop by and when. It doesn't replace the instant test above — it adds the side you could otherwise never see: a bot that never visits will never include your content in an answer, no matter how well it's written. ## What to do with the result If your instant test turns out sobering, it's worth first pinning down exactly where your details are contradictory or outdated, rather than tackling everything at once. Often a single cleaned-up, consistent source is enough to noticeably improve the AI's answer — if a deeper issue shows up instead, say AI bots barely reading your site at all, that's a good reason for a closer look together. [Let's go through where you stand, together](https://btlabs.dev/en/contact) — in a free, no-obligation first conversation we'll look at your results together. --- Source: https://btlabs.dev/en/posts/does-ai-really-cite-me-self-check Last-Modified: 2026-08-31T07:00:00.713Z Languages: [de](https://btlabs.dev/llms/de/posts/ki-zitiert-mich-wirklich-selbsttest) · [it](https://btlabs.dev/llms/it/posts/ia-mi-cita-davvero-autotest) See also: [llms.txt](https://btlabs.dev/llms.txt) · [ai.txt (Policy)](https://btlabs.dev/ai.txt) · [identity.json](https://btlabs.dev/identity.json)