You can check by hand in about ten minutes: ask the main AI platforms – ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity – plus Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, the questions a customer would ask, and see whether your business is named, described correctly and recommended. Do it monthly, note what changes, and treat being mentioned accurately as the goal, not just being mentioned.
When someone asks an AI assistant – ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot – for a recommendation, the AI model pieces the answer together from its training data and what it can read live: websites, reviews, directories and articles. AI search does not work from a single ranked list. The same question asked twice can name different businesses, and the answer depends heavily on how the question is phrased.
So there are really three things to check. Whether you are mentioned at all. Whether what it says about you is accurate, because a wrong address or an invented claim does harm, not good. And whether you are named for the searches that matter, the ones a real buyer would ask, not just your own company name.
Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity in turn, and a Google AI Overview or AI Mode where they appear, and ask the questions a customer would actually ask. Not your company name: the real customer questions. For example:
Ask each question fresh, in a new chat, and ask some of them twice on different days, because answers vary. Note which businesses get named, in what order, and what is said about them. Each accurate naming is effectively an AI citation: a source the model trusted enough to repeat. Ahrefs’ guide to monitoring brand mentions in ChatGPT recommends building a fixed set of these custom prompts and re-running them on a schedule, because the mentions that matter are the ones tied to real buying questions. 1
A simple spreadsheet is enough. One row per question, one column per tool, dated each month. Record whether you were named, what was said, and who was named instead. After two or three months you can see direction: are you appearing more, is the description improving, is a competitor consistently ahead.
This manual check is genuinely useful and it costs nothing. Its limits are honesty and scale: you will only check a handful of questions, and results vary day to day, so treat any single check as a sample, not a verdict. If you want continuous tracking across many questions, paid monitoring tools now exist for exactly this, including Ahrefs’ Brand Radar and a growing list of specialist AI visibility tools. They automate the same idea: run buying questions regularly, record who gets mentioned, and track your AI search visibility over time. Think of it as brand monitoring for the AI era: the same discipline as setting up Google Alerts for your name, extended to AI answers, and increasingly a normal part of reputation management. 2
First, do not panic and do not assume the answer is a new monthly fee. AI tools name local businesses they can understand and verify. If yours is absent, the usual reasons are boring: your website does not say plainly what you do and where, your Google Business Profile is thin, reviews are sparse or old, and nothing independent of you – directories, local press coverage, trade bodies – confirms you exist.
Those are fixable, and fixing them helps your ordinary Google rankings at the same time. Plain wording, accurate pages and simple structured data (schema markup) on your own site all help the tools read you correctly. This is machine learning pattern-matching, not a directory with an editor: the clearer and more consistent the pattern, the more often you are repeated. Our guide to getting recommended by AI tools covers the work in detail, and whether SEO is still worth paying for explains why the same foundations earn both rankings and AI mentions.
It is also worth remembering the scale. Most local businesses still get most of their enquiries through ordinary search, maps and word of mouth. In Pew Research Center’s analysis of real browsing data, about one search in five produced an AI summary, and people clicked a traditional result far more often than anything inside the summary. 3 AI recommendations matter and are growing. They are not yet the whole game.
Our answer engine optimisation work starts with exactly this kind of check: what AI tools say about you now, for the questions your customers ask. Then we fix the foundations the tools read, your pages, profiles and reviews, so there is something accurate and quotable for them to repeat. You can also try our free AI visibility prompt tool on the Bamsh free tools page to generate the checking questions for your own business.
If you would rather we ran the first check with you, book a free 15-minute call and we will look together, on screen, and tell you honestly whether there is anything worth paying to fix.
Open a fresh ChatGPT chat and ask the questions a customer would ask: “who is the best [trade] in [town]”, “recommend a [service] company near [area]”. See whether you are named and whether the description is accurate. Repeat monthly and keep notes, because answers change from day to day.
Yes. Ahrefs offers Brand Radar and several specialist AI visibility tools have launched since 2025. They automate the manual method: run a set of buying questions against the AI tools on a schedule and record who is named. Useful for ongoing tracking, but a manual monthly check costs nothing and tells you the essentials.
Usually because the competitor is easier to verify: a website that plainly says what they do and where, a complete Google Business Profile, recent reviews, and mentions on sites other than their own. AI tools repeat what they can confirm. Closing those gaps is the same work as good local SEO.
No, always read it. AI tools sometimes state old addresses, invented services or confused company details with complete confidence. If you find wrong information, fix the sources it is reading: your own pages first, then directories and profiles. Correct information in more places means fewer wrong answers.
Monthly is sensible for most small businesses. Checking daily tells you little because answers vary naturally. A dated monthly sample of your key buying questions shows the real trend, especially after you have improved your website, profile or reviews.
Sources checked 21 October 2026; links re-verified 29 October 2026. AI tools change frequently; any single check is a sample, not a verdict.
