Read the answer it gave, then find where every part of it came from.

Ask it properly first

Ask the way a customer would, not the way an owner would. Not your business name, which any assistant will be polite about, but the job somebody needs doing and the town they need it in.

Ask 3 assistants, save the answers with the date, and ask again in a month. Without the notes you have an impression instead of a measurement.

Break the answer into claims

Take the paragraph about the business it named and split it into single statements. Where they are. What they do. How long they have done it. What people say about them. What it costs.

Each of those came from somewhere, and it is usually a page you can open.

Find the source of each one

Search the exact phrase in quotes. A distinctive sentence usually lands on the page it was taken from, and that page is often not the competitor's own site: a directory, a review, a local news item, a supplier's list of stockists.

The assistants that cite sources will name them if you ask for a list. The ones that will not still answer the quoted search.

Now ask what it could have said about you

Go through your own site looking for each claim it made about them. Where do you say what you do, in a sentence? Where do you say the town? Where does a price or a range appear at all?

Most of the time the gap is not technical. The sentence simply is not on the site, in any form, for anything to lift.

Then look outside your own pages

Count the places somebody else describes your business. Reviews with words in them, a directory entry that is filled in, anything published by somebody who does not work for you.

A business with 4 outside mentions and a competitor with 40 are not being judged unfairly. They are being described by different amounts of evidence.

Write down what you found

By the end you should have a short list: 3 claims it made about them, the source of each, and whether your site makes the same claim anywhere. That list is the work, in order, and it is usually shorter than people fear.

Questions worth asking

Is it worth complaining to the assistant?

There is nobody to complain to and no queue to join. The only lever anybody outside has is what is published about the business, which is why the trace above is the useful part.

The answer named a business that closed.

Common, and it tells you something useful: that model is working from older material rather than fetching live pages. Ask the same question in one that cites sources and compare.

It named a big directory instead of any business.

Then the directory is the page to be on, and being listed properly there is a cheaper job than being named directly. Check what your entry says before assuming it exists.

Do I need to do this more than once?

Yes, on a schedule, because the answers change without warning and nothing tells you they have. A note in a file each month is the whole method.

Tell us your trade and your town and we will run the questions, then send you the answers and where they came from. Get a free audit.

Updated 6 September 2026