Ask them what an assistant says about you today.
You do not need to understand the mechanics to ask this. You need to hear whether they have an answer at all.
The short answer
Ask your agency to show you what ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity currently say when somebody asks for your trade in your city. Not a report. The actual answer, on screen.
If they can show you, ask what they have changed to affect it. If they cannot, they are not working on it, and you are paying them monthly while it does not happen.
There is no ranking report for this, no advertising slot, and nobody who can guarantee a position. Anybody offering one of those three is describing something that does not exist.
Why the question is fair rather than hostile
A share of the searching that used to start at Google now starts at an assistant, and the answer names a handful of businesses instead of ten. Being one of them or not is a larger gap than the one between third and fourth place ever was.
An agency that has not looked is not necessarily bad at its job. It is behind on one part of it, and you are entitled to ask when that changes.
What a real answer sounds like
They will talk about being described the same way everywhere a machine can read about you, about answering the questions customers actually ask in your own words, and about the sources an assistant leans on in your language.
What a thin answer sounds like is a promise of a position, or a monthly fee attached to a metric nobody can show you.
The part nobody can sell you
Nothing here is bought. There is no submission form and no paid placement inside an assistant's reply, so the position is earned or it is absent. That cuts both ways: a small studio that is genuinely the right answer to a narrow question can be named beside companies many times its size.
Where this studio sits
We are one person working from Durres in Albania, publishing in Albanian, Italian and English. The Search Console figures on this site come from Albanian clients, because those are the ones we have. We have no Italian case study yet and no interest in implying one.
Questions worth asking
Can anyone guarantee I appear in ChatGPT?
No, and an offer to do it is the clearest signal you are being sold something else. There is no slot to buy and no queue to join.
Should I fire my current agency over this?
Not on its own. Ask the question, hear the answer, and judge it against everything else they do. One gap is a conversation, not a reason to start again.
Is this instead of normal search work?
No. It sits on top of it and shares most of the same foundations. A site an assistant can read clearly is usually a site a search engine reads clearly too.
How would I check this myself?
Open an assistant, ask it for your trade in your city as a customer would, and read what comes back. Do it a few times, because the answers vary.
What if the answer names a competitor?
Then you have learned something specific and free. Look at what that competitor publishes that you do not, because the assistant read it somewhere.
Ask an assistant for your trade in your city and send us what it answers. We will tell you where that answer came from. Get a free audit.
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