How to check if AI can find your business

Before you pay anyone, you can get a rough read on your AI visibility yourself in an afternoon. The method is simple: ask the assistants your customers use the questions your customers ask, and record what they say. You are not looking for a score — you are looking for whether you appear, whether what is said is accurate, and where the gaps are.

Step 1 — Write down the real questions

List the ten questions a customer actually asks before choosing a business like yours, in their words, not your industry's. Include the local ones ("near me", your town), the comparison ones ("best X for Y"), and the practical ones (cost, availability, what to expect). These are the prompts you will test.

Step 2 — Ask several assistants and record the answers

Put each question to at least ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, with browsing or search enabled where the product offers it. Record the full answers — who is named, what is said about them, and whether you appear at all. They will differ from each other, and that difference is itself information: they use different sources and ranking.

Step 3 — Ask directly what they know about you

Now ask each assistant, by name, what it knows about your business. Note whether the details are current, wrong, or absent, and whether it can state your services, your area, and how to contact you. If it cannot describe you accurately when asked directly, it will not describe you accurately inside a recommendation.

Step 4 — Check whether your facts are retrievable and consistent

Open your own key pages and confirm the important facts are present as plain text, not trapped in images, PDFs, or scripts. Then search your business name and list every public source that describes you — your site, map listings, directories, profiles — and note every contradiction: an old address, superseded hours, a dropped service. Contradictions are the most common reason assistants hedge and leave a business out.

What your results mean

• You appear and the details are right — maintain it and monitor for drift.
• You appear but details are wrong or outdated — a consistency and retrievability problem, usually the fastest to fix.
• You do not appear at all, but competitors do — an eligibility problem: your services, area, or evidence are not clear or retrievable enough to be matched.
• Assistants disagree wildly about you — your public information contradicts itself across sources.

Keep your recorded answers. Re-running the same questions in a few months is the only reliable way to tell whether anything you changed made a difference.

When to get a proper audit

This self-check tells you whether you have a problem. A formal audit tells you exactly why and in what order to fix it — checking sources you may not know describe you, and turning the findings into a prioritised plan. If your self-check surfaced contradictions or absence, that is the signal to go deeper.

Work through the AI visibility audit checklist next, and see what an AI visibility audit is for what a formal version adds. Our services begin with exactly this check, done thoroughly; you can start with an Free check.