Ask ChatGPT the questions your buyers ask before they have ever heard of you: five real hiring situations, written in your market's own words, with your business name nowhere in the text. Five questions is enough to start. What makes them work is not how clever they are. It is that a stranger could have typed them, and that you did not.
Most owners begin somewhere else. You open ChatGPT, type the name of your firm, and read a paragraph that gets you roughly right. The relief lasts about four seconds, because that is not the question your next client is going to ask. They are going to describe a mess, a town, a budget and a fear, and they are never going to say your name. You just tested the one scenario that cannot happen.
This is the part of a self-run check that nobody teaches, and it is the part that decides whether the whole exercise is worth anything. The setup matters, the scoring matters, the number of runs matters. All of it sits downstream of the questions. A clean session asking the wrong five questions produces a tidy, well-documented answer to something you did not want to know.
So here is the craft: why a branded question quietly ruins the test, the three properties every question needs, and the five shapes worth writing. Then the same five filled in for four very different practices, which shapes give steadier readings, and why the wording has to stop moving once you are happy with it. For how to run them cleanly and what to score, our companion piece on how to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business has the method. This one is about what to put in the box.
Why Typing Your Own Name Tells You Nothing
When you name your business in the prompt, you have already done the assistant's job for it. The hard part of a recommendation is selection: out of everyone in the category, which names are worth putting in front of this person. Hand over the name and there is nothing left to select. All that remains is description, and these systems are generous describers.
That produces the most common false comfort in this whole subject. The answer comes back accurate and warm, you conclude you are visible, and you stop looking. Meanwhile the question your buyer asked, which contained a problem and no company names at all, returned four other firms. That is the answer that matters.
Both questions are worth asking eventually. They just answer different things. A branded question tells you what the record says about you once someone already knows you exist, which is a real thing to check, especially if you suspect the machine has you confused with a similarly named business. An unbranded question tells you whether you get considered at all. Keep the two on separate sheets of paper and never average them into one score.
The other tempting question is the grudge: naming a competitor and asking how you compare. It feels like the sharpest possible test and it is one of the least useful, because it drops you into a shortlist that already exists rather than measuring whether you would have made it. If a rival's name is what is bothering you, there is a better way to get at that, which we walk through in how to find out which competitors ChatGPT recommends and why.
- No company names of any kind. Not yours, not theirs. Once a name is in the prompt, most of what you are testing is description rather than selection.
- No coaching. Do not add "a boutique firm specializing in complex estates" because it describes you. You would be testing whether ChatGPT can follow a description, which it can.
- Keep branded checks separate. Run them if you want them, on their own list, scored on their own terms.
Three Things Every Test Question Needs
Here is the checklist we hold our own panels to. A usable question has three properties, and if one is missing the answer still arrives looking exactly as authoritative as a good one, which is what makes this worth being careful about.
Buying intent. The question has to be one where the answer could plausibly change who gets hired. "What is a revocable trust?" is a fine question and it tests nothing commercial, because the honest answer is an explanation with no names in it. "Who should I talk to about setting up a trust for a blended family?" is the same territory with a decision attached. If an answer could reasonably be given with no business named at all, the question is mostly measuring education, and it belongs on a different list.
Your real market. Write the words your buyers use, not the words on your services page. Practice-group labels, internal service names and the vocabulary of your professional body are all invisible to the person typing at eleven at night. Their language is sitting in your intake notes, your consultation calls, the subject lines of your inbound emails and the reviews people wrote about you. That is where the phrasing comes from. A question built out of your own website is a mirror. Mirrors always say you are covered.
No mention of your business. Covered above, and it is worth repeating because it is the property people break by accident. Location is not a brand cue and should be there. Specialty is not a brand cue either, as long as it is a specialty a buyer would name rather than a phrase only you use.
One more thing about how the sentence should read. People do not type keywords at an assistant, at least not when they are thinking something through. Semrush's study of more than 80 million lines of clickstream data from the second half of 2024 found that prompts submitted without search enabled averaged 23 words, while queries with search enabled looked like ordinary search behavior at 4.2 words. Both behaviors are real, and the long one is the one that carries a buying situation. Write full sentences with the mess left in.
There is a mechanical reason the detail helps rather than hurts. Google's documentation on its AI features says that both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a "query fan-out" technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build a response. That is Google describing its own surfaces, not a universal account of assistants; ChatGPT and Perplexity retrieve on their own terms and document them separately. Read as one worked example, it is still a useful picture of what a rich question can set off, and a reason to think a vague question gets handled vaguely.
Five Shapes Worth Writing
Five questions, five different jobs. The point of using shapes rather than five rewrites of "best accountant near me" is that a buyer does not ask the same thing five times. They circle a decision from different angles, and you want to know which angles you are present for. Five angles, not five rewrites.
- The hire question. "Who should I hire for [the problem you solve] in [your city]?" The plainest shortlist request there is. This is the one everybody writes first, and it belongs in the panel, but on its own it usually tests the crowded middle of your category rather than the ground you actually own.
- The situation question. The buyer's mess, described the way they would describe it, with no service category named at all. "My mother has dementia and I am about to take over her finances, who do I call?" In our experience this is the most revealing of the five and the one owners almost never write, because it asks you to forget what you sell and remember what happened to the client.
- The either-or question. "Should I use a [one kind of provider] or a [another kind]?" Buyers spend real time choosing between approaches before they choose between firms, and that moment is one most panels never test at all.
- The constraint question. The same hiring request with the conditions that actually decide fit: an industry, a regulation, a jurisdiction, a company size, a transaction type, a language. One or two constraints, the ones a buyer would genuinely care about, not every credential you would like acknowledged.
- The diligence question. "What should I look for before hiring [your kind of firm] for [the risky thing]?" This one tests something the other four do not. It asks whether your business shows up as the worked example inside the advice, which is how a specialist gets named by an assistant that was not asked for a shortlist.
Five shapes, five questions, one each. Resist the urge to write three versions of your favorite. A panel with five near-duplicates measures one thing five times and tells you nothing about the other four moments in the decision.
The Same Five Shapes, Four Different Practices
The shapes are portable. What they get filled with is not, and abstract advice about buyer intent tends to evaporate the moment somebody opens a blank document. So here they are, filled in, for four practices that have almost nothing else in common.
An estate attorney in a mid-size city.
- Hire. "Who should I hire to write a will in Sarasota?"
- Situation. "My father died without a will and my brother and I disagree about the house, who do we talk to?"
- Either-or. "Should I use an online will service or a local estate attorney?"
- Constraint. "Who handles estate planning for someone who owns a small business and has children from two marriages?"
- Diligence. "What should I ask an estate attorney before hiring one for a contested estate?"
A pediatric occupational therapist.
- Hire. "Who should I see for a child with sensory issues in Cedar Park?"
- Situation. "My seven year old melts down every morning before school and the teacher says he cannot sit still, who do I take him to?"
- Either-or. "Should I get an occupational therapy assessment or a psychology assessment first?"
- Constraint. "Who does pediatric OT that works with schools on an accommodation plan?"
- Diligence. "What should I look for in a pediatric therapist before booking an assessment?"
An architect who works on heritage buildings.
- Hire. "Who should I hire to renovate a listed home?"
- Situation. "We bought a hundred year old house and the council knocked back our extension, who do we bring in now?"
- Either-or. "Should I hire an architect or a design and build company for a heritage renovation?"
- Constraint. "Which architects handle heritage overlay approvals on small residential sites?"
- Diligence. "What should I ask an architect before hiring them for a heritage property?"
A bookkeeper who works with medical practices.
- Hire. "Who should I hire for bookkeeping for a medical practice?"
- Situation. "My practice has grown to twelve staff and my accountant only turns up at tax time, who fixes the day to day?"
- Either-or. "Should I hire a bookkeeper or a part time finance manager?"
- Constraint. "Who does bookkeeping for practices that bill through insurance?"
- Diligence. "What should I check before handing a bookkeeper access to my practice accounts?"
Read those four sets and the pattern shows up on its own. The hire questions look almost interchangeable. The situation questions could not belong to anybody else. That gap is the whole argument for writing all five, because the crowded question and the question you can win are rarely the same sentence.
Some Shapes Wobble More Than Others
Different shapes give readings of different steadiness, and knowing which is which will save you from over-reading a bad afternoon. Conductor, an SEO software vendor, published a study dated July 17, 2026 covering 14,000 API calls across ten industries, seven intent types and four assistants, at fifty runs per combination. It measured brand overlap, meaning the share of brands that any two runs had in common. The type of prompt predicted consistency better than the industry did: comparison prompts came in at 63 percent overlap and purchase prompts at 40 percent. It is vendor-produced research on a set of industries the vendor chose, so hold the exact figures loosely. Keep the ordering.
The practical reading for your panel is not that you should only ask the steady kind. It is that a wobbly shape needs more patience before you conclude anything from it. Our five shapes are not the same taxonomy Conductor used, so treat the mapping as rough: an either-or question sits near their comparison intent, a hire question nearer their purchase intent. Read that way, a situation question that loses you one month and finds you the next may be the shape moving rather than your record.
Which is also the answer to the engine question. The five shapes travel: a buying situation is a buying situation whether you type it into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity, and you should put the identical five to each of them. What does not travel is the conditions around them, or the answers, which on the evidence of the panels we run disagree more than owners expect. We took that apart separately in why five engines answer the same question differently about you. Record each engine under its own name and date, and never blend the five into one sentence about "AI."
Freeze the Wording, Then Leave It Alone
Now the discipline that turns five good questions into an instrument. Once you are happy with them, they stop changing. Not the phrasing, not the city, not the order of the clauses. Write them into a document, date it, and treat any edit as an event you have to note, the way you would note replacing a scale in a kitchen.
This is stricter than it sounds necessary, and there is evidence for the strictness. A May 2026 preprint tested roughly 6,000 paraphrase runs against 6,000 same-prompt reruns on OpenAI and Anthropic models, and found that two cosmetic rewordings of the same buying intent produced recommendation sets overlapping by 0.288, while adding a constraint pushed it down to 0.135. The same prompt run twice overlapped by 0.50 to 0.61. That study is a preprint rather than peer-reviewed work, and it is about paraphrases rather than calendars, so read it as a warning rather than a law: a question you tidy up between quarters is close enough to a different question that the comparison you were building gets much harder to trust.
It also means you can stop agonizing over the perfect wording. There is no perfect wording. There is a defensible set of five that a real buyer might plausibly have typed, and the value comes almost entirely from asking those same five again in three months. Good enough and repeated beats excellent and rewritten, every time.
The wording is not the only thing worth holding still. The conditions you run under move results too, which is why the companion piece asks you to record the engine, the date, the session and whether the assistant searched. Give the panel one scheduled review a year, so a genuine change in your market gets into it deliberately rather than by drift. If you want to add questions in between, add them as a second list and report them separately. That is how we run our own measurement, and it is the difference between improving the instrument and breaking it. The other half of that discipline, the denominators and the honest way to state a result, sits in how to measure whether AI visibility work is actually working.
One last thing, for the owner who already has a marketing partner and is quietly wondering what this exercise is going to start. Five written questions are the most useful thing you can bring to that conversation, because they turn a vague worry into a specific list your agency can be asked about directly. We wrote about how to have that discussion without it turning into an audit in what "we handle the AI stuff" actually covers. Nobody has to be wrong for the panel to be worth having.
Want to Learn More?
Writing the five is free, and you should do it whether or not you ever speak to us. What the panel cannot tell you is why the answers came back the way they did, or which repair to make first, and the order matters more than the effort. Our free Recommendation Check is the same idea run properly: your buyer questions put to the five engines we track, alongside a score of your record against 109 checkpoints across eight zones, hand-scored. Scores run 0 to 109. Ninety and up means AI treats you as a primary source. Under 35 means you are effectively invisible. There is no discovery call attached to it, because the report does the talking.
Beyond that sits The Answer, which is the operated version: twelve done-for-you thought-leadership articles a month, planned to create approximately 60 clear Knowledge Entries, your expertise structured so machines can read it, corroboration built beyond your own pages, and the five-engine probe run monthly with every answer saved word for word. No one can promise you a fixed place in an AI answer, so what we build is the record the assistant reads, and then we measure it in the open.
You're probably a genius at what you do. We make sure AI gets the memo.