Is my studio visible in ChatGPT? How to check in five minutes

Most studio owners have typed their studio’s name into Google. Far fewer have asked ChatGPT the question a stranger asks: “which pilates studios are there in my city”. This is how to do that properly, in five minutes, and how to read what comes back.

Why the question is worth five minutes

When ChatGPT answers with search on, it searches the web, reads the results and writes an answer with citations. OpenAI’s own documentation says the response “will include inline citations for URLs found in the web search results”. Claude does the same; Anthropic’s documentation says the response “includes citations for sources drawn from search results”. So an answer is not an opinion. It is a summary of a few pages the assistant found, and it tells you which pages. That makes it checkable.

The four questions

These are the four fixed questions the SEO & AI visibility checker sends. Two never contain your name. Two do. Fill in your modality, your city and your studio, and ask them one at a time, each in a fresh conversation, with search switched on.

1. Which [pilates / yoga / barre / CrossFit / spinning] studios are there in [city]?
2. Where can I do [activity] as a beginner in [city]?
3. Where is [studio] in [city] and what classes do they offer?
4. What does a first class at [studio] in [city] cost and how do I book it?

Ask them in the language of your website. A Dutch studio with a Dutch site should ask in Dutch; the answers to Dutch and English questions are different experiments and should not be mixed.

What to look for in the answers

For each answer, write down three things.

Are you named? For questions one and two, is your studio one of the names in the list? For three and four, does the answer talk about your studio, or does it say it could not find it, or does it describe a different business with a similar name?

Which pages are cited? Look at the citations, the small source links. Are they your website, or a directory, a review site, a city listicle, a booking platform’s page about you? Note the domains.

Is the fact right? For question four especially: is the price the assistant gives your current price? “Prices are not listed on the website” is a common answer, and it is a finding in itself. It means the sentence was not on a page the assistant read.

Then ask all four a second time. Answers change between runs. A 2026 paper on measuring AI search visibility states that “answers can vary across runs, prompts, and time, making one-off observations unreliable” and argues for repeated measurement. If you are named in one of two tries, write down “one of two”. Do not round it to yes.

Named is not the same as cited

These two outcomes look similar and mean different things.

Named means your studio’s name appears in the answer. The assistant may have got it from a directory, a review site, a news article, or your own site. You are visible, but you do not control the source. If the directory has last year’s price, the assistant has last year’s price.

Cited means the citations point to your own website. The assistant read your pages and used them. That is the outcome you want for questions three and four, because the price and the booking path should come from you.

The worst outcome is silence: not named, not cited, and other studios listed instead. The second worst is being named from a source that is wrong. Being cited from your own pages, with the right facts, is the target.

What to do with the result

If you are named and cited with the right facts, there is not much to fix. Check again in a month or two.

If you are named but not cited, look at your own pages for the facts in questions three and four. Address as text. Class types written out. Beginner information. The first-class price as a sentence near the booking button. If those are missing, the assistant had nowhere on your site to point.

If you are not named at all, start with why doesn’t ChatGPT recommend my gym. The usual causes are on your own website, and one of them is a robots.txt rule that blocks the search crawler. OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”; Anthropic says blocking Claude-SearchBot “may reduce your site’s visibility and accuracy in user search results”. A rule meant for training crawlers can have caught the search ones too.

The version with evidence

The manual test tells you what one person saw on one afternoon. The free check does the same four questions through the ChatGPT and Claude APIs, with web search on and your city set as the location (the two without your name three times each), and shows you every answer word for word with the citations. It also reads your public pages and tells you which of the facts above are written there as text, and which are not. It cannot see the consumer ChatGPT app, your Google rankings, or your Google Business Profile, and it says so. But it turns “I think we’re not showing up” into a page you can act on.

Twenty-minute action

Ask the four questions above twice each. Write the eight results in a table: named or not, cited or not, price right or wrong. Then open your homepage on your phone and see how many of questions three and four you can answer from the text on the screen. The gaps in that table are your list.