How to tell if AI is recommending your business

Step one: write the prompts a buyer would actually type

Not keywords. Sentences. People talk to assistants differently from how they search, in longer and more specific questions that often include their constraints.

Aim for twenty across four categories, and write them as your customer would, not as you would.

• Category prompts: "who are the best X in Melbourne"
• Problem prompts: "my quoting takes two days, what should I do"
• Comparison prompts: "X versus Y for a small business"
• Qualification prompts: "what should I ask an X before hiring them"

Step two: run them across all four assistants

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Use a fresh session with no history each time, because a chat that already knows you will skew towards you and give you a comfortable, useless result.

Record three things per prompt: whether you were named, who else was, and what the assistant said about your category. That third column is usually the most valuable, because it tells you the frame buyers are being handed before they ever reach you.

Step three: read the result honestly

Most businesses are not named anywhere. That is the normal starting point and not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to move, because the competitors that do appear are accumulating an advantage that compounds.

Look for who does appear. Very often it is directories, listicles and comparison pages rather than the businesses themselves, which tells you that being included in those is currently a faster route than trying to be cited directly.

If a directory is being cited instead of you, being listed in that directory is a quicker win than out-ranking it.

Step four: fix in this order

• Schema coverage, so your facts are machine-readable at all.
• Consistency of those facts everywhere you appear, starting with your Google Business Profile.
• Presence in whatever sources the assistants are already citing in your category.
• Depth on the narrow topics you want to own, rather than breadth across everything.
• Sourced statistics and clearly dated content, which lower the risk of citing you.

Then re-run it monthly

Same prompts, same conditions, recorded in the same sheet. It is currently the only honest measure of AI search visibility available, and doing it by hand for an hour a month beats waiting for a tool that reports it reliably.