If a prospect asks ChatGPT who to hire in your field, your name either comes up or it doesn’t. Here’s how to check which one — without signing up for anything you’ll regret.
Someone in your town typed a question into ChatGPT this week. Maybe it was “best estate planning attorney near me,” or “independent financial advisor in Portland,” or “top realtor for first-time buyers.” ChatGPT answered with two or three names. If yours wasn’t one of them, they called whoever was — and you never knew the conversation happened.
This is new. It wasn’t an issue three years ago because people weren’t asking AI for recommendations. Today they are, and the volume is real: ChatGPT holds roughly 80% of the AI search market. If your clients use AI at all, most of them use that one.
The practical question — the only one that matters right now — is whether you appear when someone asks about your field. You don’t need a theory about AI to answer it. You need ten minutes.
Here’s what’s different from regular Google search. When someone Googles “estate planning attorney,” they get a list of ten links. You might be on page one, you might be on page two, but you’re on the list somewhere, and the person choosing can click around.
When someone asks ChatGPT the same question, they get a short answer with two or three names. No list to scroll through. No competing options below. If you’re not in the answer, you’re not in the consideration set at all.
For businesses that run on referrals and word of mouth — most small practices — this is worth watching. It doesn’t replace your existing client flow. It just means one of your newer referral sources is invisible unless you check it.
Here’s how to do it.
Step 1 — Write down five questions your clients might ask (2 minutes).
Not your internal keywords. The way a real person would type something into a chatbot. For a financial advisor, that might be:
For a lawyer, realtor, broker, or consultant, the shape is the same — category query, specialty query, location query, how-to-find query, alternatives query. Five questions total.
Step 2 — Sign up for a free tool (1 minute).
Beamtrace is the only one I’d point you to for this check. Free plan, five prompts, no credit card. It’s built by Elfsight, a software company that’s been around 13 years and runs 90+ products for over three million customers — so you’re not signing up for something that’ll disappear in six months.
Two honest limits worth naming up front: the tool only checks ChatGPT right now (Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok are listed as coming soon), and on the free plan it re-runs your check once a week rather than every day. For a first look, both are fine. ChatGPT is the big one anyway, and weekly is plenty of signal when you’re just trying to find out if you’re invisible.
Step 3 — Delete the prompts already on the dashboard (30 seconds).
Heads up on this one. When you log in, your five prompt slots are already filled with auto-generated questions. Your quota looks fully used from the moment you sign in. Just delete those — click the trash icon on each one — and the slots open right back up. Ten seconds of work that’ll save you thinking you need to upgrade when you don’t.
Step 4 — Type your five questions in (2–3 minutes).
One per slot. Click save.
Step 5 — Wait a week, then read the report (5 minutes next week).
This is the part that isn’t instant. The tool runs your five questions once a week, so the first report arrives seven days later. Put a reminder on your calendar. Go back to work.
When the results come in, you’re looking at three things.
Did your business name appear in any answers, and how many? If it’s zero out of five, that’s your starting point — ChatGPT doesn’t know you’re a contender in your field yet. Not great news, but actionable news.
Who got named instead of you? Your competitors in this channel aren’t necessarily the ones you think of from your local market. ChatGPT will name the businesses that have strong web presences and clear signals about what they do. That list tells you who you’re actually up against in AI, which may be different from who you’re up against on the street.
Which of your five questions are you missing from? Some practices show up for location searches but not category searches, or vice versa. The pattern tells you what kind of web content is working for you and what isn’t.
The fix is not another tool. It’s the same work that gets you referrals in the first place, moved over to your website.
A practitioner website that clearly names what you do, who you serve, and where you work will eventually get cited by AI — because that’s what the model is trained to surface when someone asks. Practitioners who hide behind vague “trusted advisor” language or a homepage that doesn’t say what town they’re in tend not to appear. It’s the same principle as regular SEO, just applied to a different output.
If your site is already clear and recent (updated in the last year, has real service pages, mentions your city by name), you’re most of the way there. If it isn’t, fix that first and re-check in a month.
You don’t need to pay for anything to run this check. If you eventually want to track more than five questions, or want daily checks instead of weekly, Beamtrace’s paid tiers start at $20/month and go up from there depending on how much you want tracked. Other tools in this category run from $29/month to several hundred. For most small practices, the free plan answers the question you actually have.
That’s it. You now have a ten-minute check you can run once a month to see whether your business shows up when someone asks ChatGPT about your field. Most of your competitors aren’t doing this yet. In a year or two, most of them will be. Running it now just means you’ll have an earlier read than they will on what’s working and what isn’t.
Pricing verified April 2026. Check current plans before signing up — numbers in this category shift quarterly.
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