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How to check what AI says about your business (and fix what you find)
TLDR: When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Google to recommend a business like yours, you can find out in about 30 minutes whether you show up, what gets said, and which sources the AI is reading. This guide gives you the exact prompts to run, what to look for in the results, and the fixes that actually move the dial. You will not need to buy anything.
On this page:
- Why does it matter what AI says about you?
- Step 1: ask the AI tools what they recommend
- Step 2: check the sources behind the answer
- Step 3: audit the places AI is reading
- Step 4: fix the gaps
- Step 5: make it a monthly habit
- FAQ
Why does it matter what AI says about you?
Because your buyers are already asking. When someone types “recommend an accountant in Leeds” or “best flooring supplier in Sheffield” into ChatGPT, they get a shortlist, reasons, and sources. If you are not on that shortlist, you were never in the running, and nothing in your analytics will tell you it happened.
Brand strategist Sandra Phillipson made this point on episode 139 of the Jonny Ross podcast: checking your brand footprint is quicker and cheaper than it has ever been, and business owners who do it are regularly amazed by what is already out there. This guide turns that check into a repeatable process.
One thing before we start: this sits alongside your SEO, and the two overlap heavily. If you have not seen it, our 20 urgent SEO actions for the AI search era covers the technical side in depth.
Step 1: ask the AI tools what they recommend
Open ChatGPT, Google (for AI Overviews and AI Mode), Perplexity and Copilot. Use a private or logged-out session where you can, because these tools personalise, and you want what a stranger sees, not what your own history produces.
Run these prompts, adjusted to your business:
“Recommend a [your category] in [your town or region]. Explain why you chose each one.”
“I’m choosing between [you] and [your main competitor]. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?”
“What do people say about [your business name]?”
“What questions should I ask before hiring a [your category]?”
Record three things for each: whether you appear, what reasons the AI gives, and how it describes what you do. That last one matters most. If the machine describes you vaguely or wrongly, it is repeating what the web says about you.
Step 2: check the sources behind the answer
This is the step most people skip, and it was Sandra’s sharpest practical tip on the episode. In ChatGPT, click the sources link that appears with a web-informed answer. Perplexity shows citations by default, and Google’s AI Overviews link out too. Now you can see exactly which pages taught the AI what it believes about your market.
Look at the pattern of what gets cited: review platforms, local directories, trade bodies, Reddit and other forums, comparison articles, and sometimes a competitor’s own guide. Then ask the uncomfortable question. How many of those pages mention you at all?
Most businesses discover their entire AI presence rests on their own website, while the AI is mostly reading everywhere else. When we run this check for clients, the pattern repeats: a strong website, thin everywhere else the AI actually reads. That gap is the to-do list.
Step 3: audit the places AI is reading
Work through the sources you found in step 2 and check three things in each place:
- Are you present? A profile that does not exist cannot be read.
- Are you current? Old addresses, dead phone numbers, an out-of-date service list, or a Google Business Profile last touched in 2023 all get repeated as fact.
- Are you consistent? Same business name, same description of what you do, same positioning everywhere. If your website says “digital marketing agency”, your directory listing says “web design company” and your LinkedIn says “growth consultancy”, a machine reading all three has no idea what you are, and neither does a buyer. A muddled description in three places reads as three different businesses.
Pay special attention to reviews. Volume, recency and your replies all feed both the AI’s picture of you and the buyer’s. A steady flow of recent, detailed reviews is worth more than a wall of five-star ratings from three years ago.
Step 4: fix the gaps
In rough order of impact for most SMEs:
- Fix wrong facts first. Incorrect information being repeated by an AI is worse than absence. Correct your Google Business Profile, key directories and anywhere else stating facts about you.
- Make your positioning consistent everywhere, using the audit from step 3. One clear sentence about who you serve and what you do, used verbatim across every profile.
- Build pages around the questions buyers genuinely ask, phrased the way they ask them. The questions the AI asked in your step 1 prompts, and the ones from “what should I ask before hiring”, are a ready-made content plan. A genuinely useful FAQ page or a set of question-led pages gives AI something quotable, and it converts humans too.
- Build the review habit. Ask every happy customer, reply to everything, and keep it steady rather than in bursts.
- Earn mentions in the places the AI already reads. If a local directory, trade publication or comparison article kept appearing in your step 2 sources, being in it matters more than another generic backlink. This is where modern SEO and AI visibility converge; our guide to future-proofing your visibility strategy goes deeper on the technical side.
Step 5: make it a monthly habit
Your AI footprint moves as models update and the web changes, so re-run the step 1 prompts monthly and keep a simple log: date, tool, did we appear, what was said, what changed. Fifteen minutes once the first audit is done.
Paid monitoring tools exist for this at scale, Brandwatch and Brand24 among them, and they earn their keep for bigger brands. For most SMEs, the manual monthly check plus an alert on your brand name gets you most of the value at no cost.
FAQ
Can I make ChatGPT recommend my business?
Not directly, and be wary of anyone selling a guaranteed placement. What you can do is influence the inputs: consistent facts about you across the web, reviews, genuine mentions in sources AI reads, and pages that clearly answer buyer questions. Businesses that do that steadily show up more often. There are no shortcuts and no guarantees.
How often should I check?
Monthly for the quick prompt check, quarterly for the fuller source audit. Model updates can shift answers overnight, so a big AI product release is also a good trigger.
Does this replace SEO?
No. AI systems lean heavily on the same signals good SEO builds, and search engines still drive substantial traffic. Treat AI visibility as an extension of SEO with extra weight on mentions, reviews and consistency, rather than a replacement for it.
What if AI says something wrong or negative about my business?
Find the source first, using step 2. AI repeats what it reads, so correcting the source usually corrects the answer over time. If the source is a legitimate bad review, respond to it properly; if it is factually false and defamatory, that is a different conversation and worth taking advice on.
Want a second pair of eyes on it? We will run this exact check on your business, free, and send you what we find: where you show up, what the AI is reading, and the three fixes we would make first. Request your free AI visibility check and mention “AI visibility check” so it reaches the right desk.
This guide grew out of a conversation between Jonny Ross and brand strategist Sandra Phillipson on episode 139 of the Jonny Ross Fractional CMO podcast. Watch the full episode:
