How to Check What AI Says About Your Business

There is no dashboard for this. No tool reports what ChatGPT said to somebody in your town last Tuesday.

So you ask it yourself. It is twenty minutes, it costs nothing, and almost nobody does it.

Set it up so the answer is honest

Sign out, or use a private window. A signed-in session knows who you are, what you have asked before and roughly where you are. It will show you a friendlier picture than a stranger gets.

Ask the way a customer would. Not "tell me about Dave's Plumbing". Customers do not search like that until they already know you. They ask the question they actually have.

Do it from the right place. Where a tool uses your location, a search run from the office tells you what somebody at the office would see. If you cover several towns, that matters.

The questions worth asking

Work through these, in each tool, and write the answers down.

1. "Who should I call for a [your trade] in [your town]?" The headline question. Are you in the answer at all?
2. "Best [trade] near [suburb]" More specific. Different businesses often appear.
3. "[Your business name]" Does it know you exist, and is what it says correct?
4. "How much does [a job you do] cost in [your area]?" A research question. Whose page is being quoted?
5. "Is [your business name] any good?" Uncomfortable and worth knowing.
6. "[Your trade] near me that does [specific service]" Tests whether your actual services are understood.

Do each in ChatGPT, Google's AI results and one other. Perplexity is useful because it shows its sources plainly, which tells you where an answer came from rather than just what it said.

Ask each one twice, in separate sessions. These tools do not give identical answers to identical questions, and a single run tells you less than you think. If you appear in one of two, that is a different situation to appearing in neither.

What you are actually looking for

Are you there at all? For most small businesses, initially no. That is normal and it is not a crisis.

Is what it says true? Hours, areas, services, whether you are still trading. Wrong details are more damaging than absence, because they get repeated.

Who is there instead? Usually the most useful part of the exercise. Look at the businesses named and go and look at why. More reviews, a page that answers that exact question, a mention on a supplier site. That is a list of what to do next, written by your competitors.

What is it citing? Where sources are shown, read them. If a directory page about you is being quoted rather than your own site, your site is not answering the question well enough.

The answers that should worry you

Three results are worse than not appearing.

Wrong contact details. A disconnected number or an old address being repeated as fact. Somebody acting on that does not ring you, they conclude you have closed.

Described as doing something you do not do. Usually from a category you picked carelessly years ago, or a directory that guessed. It produces enquiries you cannot serve and a reputation you did not ask for.

Confused with another business. Common where the name is close to somebody else's in the same town. If their reviews are worse than yours, you have inherited them.

All three come from source data you can find and fix. None of them fix themselves.

Fixing what you find

If it has never heard of you, the problem is almost always ordinary visibility. These tools lean on what already ranks. Being invisible there means being absent here, and the fix is the familiar one.

If the details are wrong, go hunting for the source. It is nearly always a stale listing: an old address on a directory, a business name you stopped using, hours from before you changed them. Correct it at the source. Arguing with the tool achieves nothing; the next version will read the same bad data.

If a competitor's page is cited and yours is not, read their page properly. Usually it answers the question directly in the first two lines and yours buries it under three paragraphs about commitment to quality.

Keep a note

A short document with the date, the question, and what came back. Five minutes a month.

A simple table is enough: date, tool, question, were you mentioned, who else was, what was cited. Six months of that is a crude record, and it is the only measurement available to you.

Without it you are guessing whether anything changed, because unlike Search Console nothing here reports to you. That is also the honest reason this side of the work is harder to prove than ordinary search, and why anybody promising you a precise figure for AI visibility is estimating.

Do it once before you spend anything on it. It is the cheapest audit available and it tells you whether there is a problem worth paying to fix.