How to check whether AI assistants recommend your business

More customers now ask an AI assistant before they search Google. “Who’s the best family dentist in Sandy?” or “Which ski resorts near Salt Lake are good for beginners?” The assistant answers with a short list of names. If your business isn’t on that list, the customer may never see your website.

You can check where you stand in about 15 minutes.

The test

1. Write down five questions a customer would ask. Use their words, not yours. Mix general questions (“best roofer in Draper”) with specific ones (“roofer that handles insurance claims near me”).
2. Ask each question in three places: Google (look for the AI Overview at the top), ChatGPT with web search on, and Perplexity.
3. For each answer, note three things. Are you named? What does it say about you? Which websites does it cite as sources?

The third point matters most. AI assistants repeat what trusted sources say. If every answer cites the same directory, review site or local news article, that source is where your work should start.

What usually keeps a business out of the answers

• Thin pages. The website never says plainly what the business does, where, and for whom. AI tools favor pages that answer a question directly.
• Inconsistent details. The name, address, phone or services differ between the website, Google and directories, so the AI can’t be confident they’re the same business.
• Missing from the sources it trusts. Competitors are listed on the review sites and directories the AI cites, and you aren’t.
• Blocked crawlers. Some websites unknowingly block AI crawlers in their robots.txt file.

What to do first

Start with the cited sources. Get listed where you’re missing, and make sure your details match exactly. Then add a page, or a section of a page, that answers each of your five questions in plain language. Run the test again in a month.

If you’d rather have this done for you, the AI Search Visibility Report runs the test across more questions, checks your robots.txt, llms.txt and schema, and lists the exact pages and listings to fix.