Does AI know your business exists?

There’s a search you’ve probably never done for your own business.

Don’t Google your company.
Ask ChatGPT who it recommends.
Then ask Claude. Gemini. Perplexity.

Ask the same questions your customers would ask when they’re looking for a company like yours.

What comes back can be surprising.

You might appear consistently. You might appear on one platform and disappear completely on another. AI may know your company but describe it incorrectly. Or your competitors may appear while you don’t.

That’s AI visibility. And before you try to improve it, you need to know where you stand.

The 30-minute AI visibility check

This isn’t a precise audit. It’s a quick, honest look at where you stand, and it’s something you can do yourself this week.

1. Start with the questions that actually matter.

   Write 10 to 15 questions a prospective customer might genuinely ask. Not questions containing your company name. Discovery questions:

   • “Who specializes in X near me?”
   • “Which company would you recommend for Y?”
   • “What should I look for when hiring Z?”

2. Ask more than one AI.

   Use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Don’t assume appearing in one means appearing in another. Recent studies continue to find significant differences in the businesses and sources different AI systems surface. Read one study.

3. Don’t test once.

   Run important questions more than once and date every test. AI-generated recommendations aren’t fixed rankings. You’re looking for patterns, not celebrating one favourable response.

4. Record more than whether you appeared.

   Did it name you? Recommend you? Link to you? Describe you accurately? Which competitors appeared? What sources did it cite? That’s far more useful than a yes or no column.

5. Investigate why.

   Only after testing visibility do you inspect the digital foundation: crawlability, site content, entity clarity, structured data, local and business profiles, third-party mentions, reviews, citations, and the sources the AI actually relied on.

6. Establish a baseline and measure change.

   Now you’ve got something worth monitoring. Re-run the same questions on a schedule and compare.

What to record

One row per question, per platform, per date.

Example rows only. Your answers will differ.

Why the order matters

Most advice skips straight to fixes. You don’t appear, so check robots.txt, add schema, write FAQs, get reviews. Each of those can help. Done blind, they’re a checklist, and a checklist is a guess.

The better order:

1. Find out where and when you’re absent.
2. Investigate why.
3. Fix the underlying authority and visibility problem.
4. Measure whether it changed.

Before we recommend anything, we ask why.

Keep reading

• AEO, GEO and SEO, in plain EnglishRead →
• Structured data: the nutrition label of your websiteRead →
• Your buyers ask questions. Does your website answer them?Read →
• What proof helps a buyer trust your business?Read →