You do not need a tool to find out whether AI assistants recommend your business. You need fifteen minutes, a notepad, and the discipline to ask the questions your customers ask rather than the ones you wish they asked.
Step 1: Write down six questions
Write them the way a customer would type them, town included. Mix these shapes:
- Hire intent. “Who is a good roofer in Peoria?” “Best dentist for implants in Champaign.”
- Problem first. “My AC stopped blowing cold in Normal IL, who should I call?”
- Comparison. “Is [your business] any good?” “[Your business] vs [competitor].”
- Cost and process. “How much does a furnace replacement cost in Bloomington?”
- Trust. “Is [your business] licensed and insured?” “[Your business] reviews.”
Use the words your customers use on the phone, not industry terms. Nobody with a flooded basement types “water mitigation services.”
Step 2: Ask four assistants
Open each of these and ask the same six questions:
- ChatGPT (logged out or a fresh chat)
- Claude
- Perplexity
- Gemini
Ask each question in a new conversation so the earlier answers do not color the next one. If the assistant asks for your location, give the town.
Step 3: Record three things per answer
For each answer, note:
- Named. Did it say your business name?
- Cited. Did it link to, or clearly draw from, your website?
- Who else. Which businesses did it name instead of, or alongside, you?
That is 24 answers. It is normal for a local business to be named in one or two of them, or none. Most owners are surprised by how few.
Step 4: Read the pattern, not the score
A few things the results usually reveal:
One assistant names you and the others do not. Perplexity reads the live web and will pick up a decent site quickly. ChatGPT and Claude lean more on what has been written about you over time. If only Perplexity names you, your site is fine and your off-site reputation is thin.
A competitor is named everywhere. Look them up. Nine times out of ten they have more recent reviews, consistent listings, and pages that actually answer the question. That is the gap, and it is closable.
The assistant names a directory instead of a business. “You could try Angi or Yelp.” That means no business in your area is legible enough to recommend. The first one that becomes legible takes the spot.
The assistant gets your details wrong. Old address, wrong phone, a service you dropped. That is a listing consistency problem, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
Step 5: Save the screenshots
Screenshot every answer, with the date visible. This is your baseline. Re-run the same six questions in 60 days, after you have made changes, and compare. Without the baseline you will not be able to tell whether anything you did worked.
What to fix first
If you want to act on the results yourself, in this order:
- Make your name, address, and phone identical everywhere. Google Business Profile, Yelp, BBB, Facebook, any industry directory.
- Check that your site allows AI crawlers. Look at yoursite.com/robots.txt. If it blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, that is why you are invisible to them.
- Rewrite your top three service pages as answers. What you do, where, for whom, what it costs, what happens when they call.
- Add structured data that names the business, its service area, and its services.
- Ask for reviews every week, not once a year.
If you would rather have the audit run for you with a frozen question set and a written report, it is free and takes 48 hours.