A growing number of buying decisions now start with a question to an AI: "who's a good [what you do] in [your town]?" or "what are the best options for [your product]?" Google's AI Overviews answer it at the top of the results page, and ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answer it without a results page at all. If those answers name a few businesses and yours isn't one of them, you've lost that customer before a link was ever clicked.
The good news: you can check where you stand in about ten minutes, and most of the causes are within your control.
First, a reality check
No one can guarantee a place in an AI answer. Google generates AI Overviews dynamically and doesn't expose a ranking dial for them, and the same is true of ChatGPT and Perplexity. What you can do is remove the things that keep you out and strengthen the signals that make your content easy to pull in. Think of it as improving your odds, not buying a placement.
It also helps to know that being named and being cited are different things. An assistant can mention your business without linking to your site; our guide to mentioned vs cited explains why only the second reliably brings you customers.
How to check whether AI mentions 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 Google (to see whether an AI Overview appears), ChatGPT with web search on, Perplexity 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 show you what "good enough to be cited" looks like in your category.
Not every search triggers an AI Overview, and the ones that do vary by intent and location. Part of this exercise is finding out which of your target questions actually produce one, so you focus effort where it's in play.
Why the citations matter: most AI answers lean heavily on third-party sources (directories, review platforms, 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.
The common reasons you're left out
1. AI crawlers can't reach your site. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot are blocked in your robots.txt, or by your host or CDN, you're invisible to those systems by default, not by ranking. This is the first thing to rule out; our AI crawler accessibility checklist walks through it in a few minutes.
2. Google can't crawl or render your content properly. If key content only appears after JavaScript runs, or important pages are blocked or slow, Google may not have a clean version to summarise. AI Overviews build on the same foundations as classic ranking; they don't bypass them. See JavaScript SEO if your site is built with a framework like React.
3. Your content doesn't directly answer the question. AI answers favour content that answers a specific question clearly and early. A page that circles the topic in marketing language gives the model little to extract. A page with a direct, well-structured answer near the top gives it something to lift.
4. Your key facts are hard to extract. If your services, location and hours are buried in images, PDFs or JavaScript-only widgets, an AI system may not be able to read them cleanly.
5. Weak trust signals. For anything where accuracy matters, Google leans on signals of expertise and trustworthiness (often discussed as E-E-A-T). Thin content, no clear author and few corroborating sources make your page a riskier thing to cite. Our guide to E-E-A-T covers this in plain terms.
6. Thin or inconsistent third-party presence. Few reviews, missing directory listings, or a name, address and phone number that differ between your site, your Google Business Profile and directories all reduce an AI system's confidence in you. See local citations and NAP consistency.
7. No structured data. Schema markup tells search engines what your content is: a FAQ, a how-to, a product, a local business. It's not a magic switch, but it removes ambiguity. See our structured data guide and LocalBusiness schema.
What you can actually change
- Unblock the AI crawlers if the checklist turned up a block, and fix the technical foundations (crawlability, rendering and speed). If a crawler struggles to read the page, nothing downstream matters.
- Answer questions directly. Put a clear, factual answer near the top of key pages, supported by detail below, with headings that match how people actually ask. A genuine FAQ that answers the prompts from your check gives AI systems something citable.
- Make your core facts explicit. 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.
- Strengthen trust signals with a named author, real credentials and sources on the topics you want to be known for.
- Add structured data (FAQ, how-to or LocalBusiness schema) where it genuinely fits the page.
The same work improves your odds in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity at once. It's one underlying discipline, not three.
A note for UK small businesses
Most AI-visibility and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) tools, such as Profound, Otterly, Peec AI and AthenaHQ, are built for enterprise marketing teams, with entry pricing typically around $99-$295 a month and content written for US search behaviour. If you're a plumber, an accountant or a small retailer, you don't need an enterprise dashboard to make progress. The manual check above, plus the fixes in this guide, cover the things that matter at small-business scale. Our round-up of the best AI visibility tools is there if you do outgrow it.
A related question is llms.txt, which is often sold as essential for AI visibility. The evidence says otherwise for most businesses; see llms.txt explained.
Check your AI readiness in one scan
AuditCrow's free AI visibility check tests the foundations above 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 the key things to fix in plain English, with no signup to see your results. Start with the page you most want cited, and work through the fixes above from the top.
