Brandie Neagles
You don’t need a paid monitoring tool to find out whether AI tools recommend your business. You need about fifteen minutes and a short list of the right questions to ask. Here’s the full, free version of the audit. No signup required.
Three kinds of questions worth testing
Most people testing this only try one thing: typing their own business name into ChatGPT. That tells you something, but not the most useful thing. Test three different types of questions instead.
Recommendation prompts. Ask the question your ideal customer would actually type, like “who’s a good [your service] in [your city],” “best [your category] near [your neighborhood].” This is the one that matters most, since it’s the actual moment you’re trying to win.
Brand prompts. Ask directly about your business: what it does, where it’s located, what its hours are. This surfaces something a recommendation prompt won’t: whether the AI tool has your information at all, and whether it’s accurate. Wrong hours or an outdated address showing up confidently in an AI answer is worth knowing about immediately.
Comparison prompts. Ask something like “is [your business] good” or “[your business] vs [a specific competitor].” This tends to surface which sources the AI is actually pulling from when it forms an opinion about you. Sometimes it’s review sites, sometimes your own website, sometimes neither.
How to actually run the check
We covered how differently ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode work in ChatGPT, Perplexity & Google AI Mode: Where Should You Actually Show Up?. For this audit, check all three, since a business can be visible on one and invisible on another.
A few things that’ll give you cleaner results:
Use a private or logged-out browser session where you can. Several of these tools personalize results based on your account history, which can make your own business seem more visible than it actually is to a stranger.
Ask each question a couple of different ways. Phrasing genuinely changes the answer. “Best plumber near me” and “who should I call for a burst pipe” can return different results even though a human would recognize them as the same question.
Don’t stop at one run. AI answers aren’t static the way a Google ranking is. The same question asked twice can return a different list. One check tells you what happened once; running it a few times gives you a more honest picture of your actual visibility, not just a lucky or unlucky moment.
What to actually write down
For each question you test, keep it simple: Did your business get mentioned at all? If so, was the information accurate? And which sources (a review site, a directory, your own website) seemed to be behind the answer?
That last one is worth paying attention to. If an AI tool mentions your business but never seems to be pulling from your own website, that tells you something different than if it’s not mentioning you at all. It means you have some visibility already, but your own site isn’t the thing earning it.
Most business owners have a vague sense that they ‘should probably check this AI stuff.’ Actually running the fifteen-minute version turns a vague worry into a specific, short list of things to fix. That’s a much better place to be.
Brandie Neagles, Coyote Creative
What your results actually mean
If your business doesn’t show up at all for recommendation prompts, that’s useful information, not a crisis. As we said in How AI Search Is Changing How Customers Find Local Service Businesses, most local businesses haven’t looked at this yet, so there’s a real window to get ahead of it. Treat it as a starting point, not a verdict.
If your business does show up but with wrong information, that’s worth acting on faster. An AI tool confidently telling a potential customer the wrong hours or an old address is actively costing you business right now, quietly and without any notification.
Once you have your results
A short list of specific gaps is far more useful than a general sense that you “should probably work on AI visibility.” Whatever the audit turns up (missing information, wrong details, no visibility at all in one platform), that becomes your actual to-do list, not a vague future project.
Want us to run this audit for you? Book a free strategy session and we’ll walk through your results together.
