What ChatGPT and Perplexity can actually see about your business

You can find out in about ten minutes, without any tools and without paying anyone. Ask an AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Grok) six specific questions about your business, then read the answers for three things: whether it knows you exist, whether the details are right, and whether it recommends you when you are not named. Most owners are surprised by question four.

Before you start

Two rules, or the results will mislead you. The first is the one people skip, and skipping it is how an owner concludes they are doing fine.

Strip out everything the AI assistant already knows about you. A system that has been discussing your business with you for months will hand your own name back because you put it there. That is not visibility. That is recall.

ChatGPT gives you the exact instrument for this, and it is worth using rather than approximating with a private window. OpenAI’s memory documentation describes memory as remembering “useful context from your chats, files, and connected apps to personalize your experience,” and names the clean-room option: “Temporary Chats do not use existing memories or create new memories.” Run your audit in one.

Better still, verify it afterwards rather than assuming. The same documentation notes you can see what shaped a reply, including “custom instructions, past chats, files, and memories,” by tapping the book icon under the response. If your business appears there, the answer you just read was about your history and not about your record. OpenAI adds the honest caveat that sources “may not show every factor,” so treat a clean panel as good evidence rather than proof.

Run it in at least two places. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI overview, Claude, Copilot. Pick two or three. They draw on different sources and they disagree more than people expect. One good answer is not a result. The pattern across several is.

The six questions

Ask them in this order. The order matters, because the first three tell you what is known and the last three tell you what is chosen.

1. “What is [your business name] in [your city]?”Tests whether you exist in the record at all. A blank here is the plainest possible finding.
2. “What services does [your business name] offer, and what do they cost?”Tests whether your offer is legible. Vague answers usually mean your services live inside images, menus that load late, or a booking widget the crawler never sees.
3. “What are [your business name]’s hours and where exactly is it?”Tests whether your sources agree. Watch for hedging. Hours may vary and you should confirm are what an AI assistant says when it found a contradiction it will not adjudicate.
4. “I need a [what you do] near [your area]. Who would you recommend?”The one that matters. You are not named in the question. If you do not appear here, you are not in the consideration set, whatever the first three answers said.
5. “What do people say about [your business name]?”Tests whether your reviews are readable as text and whether the themes in them match what you would want said.
6. “Compare [your business] and [a named competitor].”Tests the shape of the gap. The comparison is usually more specific about whichever business published more.

Question four carries the weight for a reason worth stating. Pew Research Center, tracking the real browsing of 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025, found that where a search produced an AI summary people clicked a result in 8% of visits, against 15% where it did not, and ended the session entirely 26% of the time against 16%. That is Google specifically, one month, US adults, and it is not a measurement of your industry. But it is a measured version of the thing question four is asking: increasingly the answer is the destination, and not being named in it is not a soft loss.

How to read the answers

Score each answer as one of three things, and write the score down. You want the pattern, not the anecdotes.

Absent. The assistant does not know you, or confuses you with a business of a similar name in another city. Newer businesses and businesses with common names see this most.

Present but thin. It knows the name and roughly the category and nothing else. It hedges on details. This is the ordinary result for a business that has never done any of this work, and it is the one that costs you question four.

Present and described. It names services, area, something specific about how you work, and it does that without hedging. This is what you are aiming at.

Then check the citations, if the product shows them. Perplexity and Google’s overview usually do. The cited sources tell you where the AI assistant is actually getting your business from. When that list is all third-party directories with your own site nowhere on it, you have learned the most useful thing in the whole exercise, and you have also just been handed your repair list in priority order.

The four findings that come up most

Four things recur, and they are the same four this journal keeps returning to from different directions.

The site is unreadable where it counts. Services in a carousel image. Prices in a PDF. Hours only inside an embedded booking tool. A person sees all of it and a crawler sees an empty page, and this is not a hypothetical: when Vercel and MERJ examined crawler behaviour across their network, they found the major AI crawlers fetch JavaScript files without executing them. Anything your page assembles in the browser was not what they took away.

The sources disagree. An old suite number, a former business name, a phone number from two moves ago, still live on a directory nobody has logged into since 2021.

There is nothing but the site. No independent mention anywhere: no directory, no association, no press, nothing anyone else wrote. A business that only talks about itself is a business nothing can corroborate.

The reviews are strong and silent. Excellent ratings, almost no text, or text inside a platform an AI assistant cannot read. Stars are a number. The words are the description, and only the words can be quoted back.

What to do with what you find

Fix in this order, because it is the order of yield.

First, make the boring facts readable as text on your own site. Second, correct the listings that disagree. Third, get one or two genuine independent mentions. Fourth, ask satisfied customers to say what they came in for, not just how many stars they would give.

Then re-run the six questions in a month and compare the scores. Not the wording, which changes every time and means nothing on its own. The scores.

If you would rather not do the fixing yourself, that is what AI Visibility Strategy is: the same audit, run properly, then the work behind it.

Questions people ask