Ten prompts every carpet cleaner should test in ChatGPT

How to run a fair ChatGPT test

A prompt test only helps if you can repeat it the same way every month. If the wording, the town or the account changes, you can't tell whether a new answer came from your marketing or from the test itself. Our guide to how AI search picks a carpet cleaner covers why these answers matter and what we work on first. This post gives you the ten prompts and a routine for running them.

1. Use a clean session. Log out of ChatGPT, or open a fresh chat with no earlier conversation in it. If you've talked to ChatGPT about your business before, don't test from that chat.
2. Paste each prompt word for word. Keep the ten prompts in a note on your phone and copy them every time.
3. Use one real town name. Replace [city] with the town where you want the most jobs, and keep it the same each month.
4. Take the first answer. Don't regenerate or reword the prompt until you get an answer you like, because that defeats the point of the test.
5. Test in the same week each month. The first Monday of the month works fine.
6. Run the same ten in other AI tools. Perplexity and Google's AI Mode are worth checking too. Keep each tool's results separate.

We can't confirm from OpenAI's help pages exactly how saved memories, settings or earlier chats affect the answers in your own account. So we take the safe route and test logged out or in a fresh chat. Even then, treat each answer as one sample, not a fixed ranking.

Keeping the tools apart matters too. Google says its own two AI features differ: "AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary." We apply the same caution to ChatGPT and Perplexity and never blend their results into one score.

Prompts 1 to 3: local "best carpet cleaner" questions

These are the broad questions someone types when they don't have a company in mind yet. They show whether ChatGPT connects your business with your town at all.

• Prompt 1: "Who is the best carpet cleaner in [city]?" This is the most direct version. Note whether you're named and where you land in the list.
• Prompt 2: "Recommend three carpet cleaning companies in [city] with strong reviews." Asking for a set number makes one month easy to compare with the next.
• Prompt 3: "I'm moving out of a rental in [city] and need the carpets cleaned before the inspection. Who should I call?" This one is written the way a tenant describes a real problem, not the way a keyword tool lists it.

If you cover several towns, start with the one you most want work from. Add a second town only if you'll run all ten prompts there every month too. A small test you keep up is worth more than a big one you run once.

Prompts 4 to 6: pet urine, upholstery, and tile and grout

Service prompts test whether ChatGPT knows what you clean, not just where you work. Pick the services you most want to book, and phrase each prompt the way a customer describes the problem.

• Prompt 4: "Who in [city] can get dog urine smell out of carpet for good?" This shows whether your pet odor work is known beyond your own customer list.
• Prompt 5: "Who is the best upholstery cleaner in [city] for a microfiber sectional?" This checks whether your furniture cleaning shows up at all.
• Prompt 6: "Who does tile and grout cleaning in [city], and do they seal the grout?" Change the second half if you don't seal grout, so the prompt matches work you do.

Read the sentence ChatGPT writes about each company it names. Note the words it uses, such as "pet odor specialist" or "strong reviews for upholstery," and then look for where similar words appear online. If the answer shows sources, click them and see which pages it lists.

If you do the work but don't get named, check whether you have a page for that service that says plainly what you do. We go deeper on each service in how to market pet odor removal, how to market upholstery cleaning and how to market tile and grout cleaning.

Prompts 7 to 9: comparison and trust questions

These prompts copy the moment a customer has a short list and wants help choosing. They show how your reviews and your public details read to a stranger.

• Prompt 7: "Compare [your company] and [a competitor you often lose jobs to] for carpet cleaning in [city]." Pick one real competitor and keep the same one every month.
• Prompt 8: "Is [your company] in [city] a good carpet cleaner? What do customers say about them?" This shows how your reviews get summed up.
• Prompt 9: "Which carpet cleaning companies in [city] are insured and IICRC certified?" Use this only if both are true for you, and swap in whatever credential you hold.

On these answers, watch for three things. Does the summary repeat an old complaint? Does it state a price or policy you don't have? Does a competitor get specific praise while you get a generic line?

When a competitor gets the specific line, read their reviews next to yours. If theirs name the job and the result and yours mostly say "great job," that is the gap we'd work on first. Ask customers to mention what you cleaned, without telling them what to write. Our guide to carpet cleaning reviews and reputation covers how to ask.

Prompt 10: check what ChatGPT says about your business

The last prompt is a fact check. It asks ChatGPT to describe your business directly, so you can compare its answer with the truth.

Check each item against your website and your Google Business Profile, line by line:

• Your business name, spelled exactly the way it appears on your truck and invoices
• Your main phone number, not an old line or a number you retired
• The towns you serve, with none missing and none you've dropped
• Your services, including any it lists that you don't offer
• Your cleaning method, such as truck-mount hot water extraction or low-moisture cleaning
• Your website address

If something is wrong, look for where the wrong detail lives online. Good places to start are old directory listings, a Facebook page under a former name, or an outdated page on your own site. Fix it there, then check again next month. Our Google Business Profile guide covers keeping your main listing accurate.

If ChatGPT says it has no information about you, record that too. It gives you a starting point to measure against.

What to record each month

A plain spreadsheet is enough. Use one row for each prompt in each tool. Ten prompts in three tools comes to 30 rows a month.

Paste the full answer into a notes column or save a screenshot. A few months from now, you'll want the exact wording, not just a yes or no. If you can, add one more column for what new customers told your office when asked how they heard about you.

How to read your ChatGPT results

Look for patterns across three or more months before you change anything. AI answers vary by wording, user and day, so one bad month means little on its own.

Telling ChatGPT about your business in your own chat

Some owners type a full description of their company into ChatGPT, hoping it will pass the word on. We haven't found OpenAI documentation saying that what you type into your own chats gets your company recommended to other people, so we don't count on it. What OpenAI does document is how ChatGPT search finds websites. It says its OAI-SearchBot crawler "is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features," and that sites opted out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers," though they can still appear as navigational links.

OpenAI also says site owners manage that opt-out in robots.txt, the file that tells crawlers which parts of a site they may read. So check that your robots.txt doesn't block OAI-SearchBot. Then put your effort into what the public can see: your website, your Google listing, your reviews and the directories that list you. The AI search guide lists what we check first.