A growing number of buying decisions now start with a question to an AI assistant: "who's a good [what you do] in [your town]?" or "what are the best options for [your product]?" If ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode names a few businesses and yours isn't one of them, you've lost that customer before a search result was ever clicked. The good news: you can check where you stand in about ten minutes, and most of the fixes are things you control.
How to check if AI assistants mention you
You don't need a paid tool to get a first read. Do this manually:
- Write down the questions a customer would actually ask. Not your brand name - the category. "Best [service] near [town]", "affordable [product] UK", "who does [specific job] in [area]". Aim for five to ten realistic prompts.
- Ask them across the major assistants. Put each prompt into ChatGPT (with web search on), Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews/AI Mode, and Gemini. Use a fresh or logged-out session so your own history doesn't skew the answer.
- Record three things for each answer: Does your business get named? If so, is the information (services, location, phone, opening hours) accurate? And which sources did the assistant cite - your website, a directory, a review site, a competitor's page?
- Note who does show up. The businesses and pages that get cited are your real competition for AI visibility, and they tell you what "good enough to be cited" looks like in your category.
Why the citations matter: most AI answers lean heavily on third-party sources - directories, review platforms, and well-structured informational pages - not just brand websites. If you're being left out, the fix is often as much about your presence across the web as it is about your own site.
Why you might not be showing up
A few common reasons, roughly in order of how often we see them:
- AI crawlers can't reach your site. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot are blocked in your robots.txt or by your host/CDN, you're invisible to those systems by default. This is the first thing to rule out - our AI crawler accessibility checklist walks through it.
- Your key facts are hard to extract. If your services, location, and hours are buried in images, marketing prose, or JavaScript-only content, an AI system may not be able to lift them cleanly.
- You're thin on third-party signals. Few reviews, inconsistent listings, or no presence on the directories your category relies on all reduce the chance of being cited.
- Inconsistent business details. If your name, address, or phone number differ across your site, Google Business Profile, and directories, AI systems have less confidence in which version is right.
What to do about it
- Unblock the AI crawlers if the checklist above turned up a block.
- Make your core facts explicit and easy to find - a clear services list, location, opening hours, and pricing bands in plain HTML text, near the top of the relevant pages.
- Link your business profiles - connect your site to your Google Business Profile and social profiles so AI systems can confirm who you are.
- Shore up third-party presence - claim and complete your listings, keep them consistent, and earn genuine reviews on the platforms your category uses.
- Answer real customer questions on your site - a clear FAQ or guide that directly answers the prompts from step 1 gives AI systems something citable.
Check your AI readiness in one scan
AuditCrow's free AI visibility check tests exactly these foundations on the page you give it: whether AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are allowed to read the page, whether your business profiles are linked so AI knows who you are, and whether you offer an llms.txt guide and a clear AI-bot policy. You get a score out of 100 and the top things to fix - no signup to see your results.
Run a free scan to see where you stand. UK small business? We've written a dedicated UK guide to AI visibility that walks through the same checks with UK examples.