Somebody has probably told you that customers ask ChatGPT for recommendations now and that you need to do something about it. Maybe. It depends on your category, and you can find out this afternoon without buying anything.
One definition first. AI visibility means how often assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews name your business when somebody asks a question you would want to be the answer to. You measure it by asking and reading the answers.
Table of Contents
First question: does your category get answered at all?
For some questions, assistants produce a list of named businesses with links. For others they give generic advice and tell you to search locally. If your category falls in the second group, there is nothing to be named in, and no work on your site changes that this quarter.
So the starting point is “does ChatGPT hand out names in my line of work”. Write five questions the way a customer would type them: full sentences with real detail, such as “I have lower back pain from sitting, who should I see in Manchester”. Open a temporary chat so your own history does not colour the answer, name your country, and ask all five.
- Named businesses, and you are one. The job is to stay there and to watch who else is listed.
- Named businesses, and you are not among them. The rest of this guide is for you.
- No names at all. Nothing to optimise yet. Put a calendar reminder and run the same five questions in three months. Categories move out of this state faster than people expect.
The free first pass, step by step
If the check showed names, spend an hour doing it properly.
- Write eight to ten questions. Mix the broad one (“best X in Y”), the specific problem, the price question, a comparison, and one from somebody who already knows you (“is [your business] any good”). You will re-run these for months, so choose carefully.
- Use a temporary or logged-out chat. An assistant that knows you run a bakery will bend its answer towards your bakery. That feels great and tells you nothing.
- Ask in your own country and language. If you serve Spain, ask in Spanish and say Spain.
- Repeat each question three times over a couple of weeks, not three times in one chat.
- Record it in a spreadsheet, one row per question per run.
The columns that matter: date, assistant, the exact question, whether you were named, roughly where, who else was named, and which websites the answer cited. That last column is the one people skip and later want, because it names the directories, review sites and roundups the assistant reads.
One run proves nothing. Ask the same question twice and you can get two different lists, because these systems sample their answers and search the live web on some runs and not others. A screenshot of yourself in first place is not evidence that you are in first place. Three runs across two weeks tell you whether you are usually, occasionally or never there.
If the spreadsheet hour does not appeal, the free AI Visibility Report from LLM Pulse runs a version of this for you, and the brand mention checker answers the narrower question of whether you get mentioned for one prompt. Neither replaces reading a few full answers yourself, which is where you spot a review site you have never heard of being cited three times.
What actually moves the needle, roughly in order
This is slower than paid ads. If you need bookings next week, put the money into ads and come back to this. Some of the work below never produces a clean before-and-after number.
| Action | Effort | Likely return |
|---|---|---|
| Consistent name, address and category everywhere | Low, one afternoon | High, the foundation for the rest |
| Reviews on the platforms assistants read | Low effort, long timeline | High |
| Third-party lists and directories in your niche | Medium, ongoing | High |
| Answering real customer questions on your own site | Medium | Medium, helps ordinary search too |
| Making sure AI bots can read your site | Low, one check | Zero if it is fine, decisive if it is not |
Be findable as one business, not three. Assistants assemble a picture of you from many sources. If your name is written three ways and you are filed under “consultant” in one place and “marketing agency” in another, that picture is blurry. Pick the exact name, address, phone and category, then make your site, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and old directory entries match.
Get reviews where assistants can see them. Answers about local and service businesses lean heavily on review platforms and Google Business Profile. Asking for a review after a job well done is advice you have heard for ten years, and it now has a second payoff.
Be on the third-party lists in your niche. When an assistant lists businesses, it is usually reading somebody else’s list: a trade directory, a local roundup, a marketplace, a forum thread. Your citations column already told you which. Get listed there, in that order. One well-cited directory can beat a month of blog posts.
Answer the real questions on your site, plainly. Prices or price ranges, service area, what you do and refuse to do, how long a job takes. Write it the way you would say it on the phone. Assistants quote pages that state things and struggle with pages that gesture at them. Our GEO guide covers the content side in depth.
Check that AI bots can reach your site. Some sites block the crawlers assistants use, often because a plugin or bot-protection setting did it unnoticed. If you are invisible everywhere and competitors are not, check this first. We wrote up how in AI bot access on your website.
If you are local or serve specific areas
Local answers are heavily location dependent. The same question asked about Bristol and about Leeds returns two different lists, and an assistant with no location signal may hedge and name nobody. So test each place you serve, separately: four towns means four sets of questions and four different results. Being the obvious answer at home tells you nothing about the town twenty miles away.
Your Google Business Profile and review count carry more weight here than any blog post. Keep the profile complete, correctly categorised and current, and if you serve an area rather than a shopfront, name the towns in plain text on your site.
When paying for tracking is worth it, and when it is not
Plenty of small businesses should not pay for this yet. If you are a sole trader, three questions cover everything a customer could ask, and your competitive set is two people you know by name, the manual pass is enough. Do it once a quarter and spend the money elsewhere.
Paying starts to make sense when a dozen or more questions are worth watching, competitors in those answers affect your pipeline, and somebody has the budget and the job description to act on the data. You cannot re-run forty questions across five assistants every week by hand, and you need a trend rather than a snapshot.
Our entry plan is Starter at EUR 49 per month for 50 prompts, run weekly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews. That is more than a thousand tracked answers a month, with mentions, competitors and cited sources recorded for each. Details are on our pricing page. Whatever you use, fifty prompts that mirror how your customers speak will teach you more than five hundred keyword fragments.
A 30-day plan
Week 1: measure. Write your questions and run each three times in a temporary chat, in your country and language, across at least two assistants. By Friday you should know how often you were named and who was named instead.
Week 2: fix the foundations. Decide the canonical name, address, phone and category, then correct them everywhere. Check the Google Business Profile is complete and that AI bots are not blocked.
Week 3: go where the answers already look. Pull the five most cited sources out of your spreadsheet. Get listed, claim the profile, fix the outdated entry, or ask to be included. Start a review-request habit and keep it.
Week 4: write, then re-measure. Take two or three questions where you were never named and rewrite the page that answers each directly, with prices, locations and specifics. Re-run the original questions and compare with week 1. Expect very little movement: change shows up in month two or three.
Then decide whether to keep running it by hand each quarter, or put the same prompt set on a weekly schedule in a tool such as LLM Pulse and let it build the trend for you.
FAQ
Is this just SEO again?
It overlaps heavily, and anyone calling it a completely new discipline is selling something. Clear pages, a reachable site, third-party mentions and reviews help in both places. The differences are narrower than the hype: no ranking position, answers that vary between runs, and much of what decides your presence sitting on other people’s sites. We compared them in GEO vs SEO.
How long does it take to see a change?
Weeks to months, on no predictable schedule. Unblocking bots can show quickly, because the constraint was mechanical. A new directory listing takes a few weeks. Building enough reviews and third-party presence to be named in a competitive category takes months. Anyone quoting a fixed number of days is guessing.
Do I need an agency?
For the work in this guide, no. An owner with a spreadsheet can do the measurement, and the fixes are ordinary business hygiene. An agency earns its fee when the content work is beyond your time, when you serve many locations, or when you want somebody accountable for the trend. Do not pay for a report of what ChatGPT said once.
What if AI says something wrong about my business?
It happens and is usually traceable: wrong prices, closed locations, services you dropped years ago, sometimes a confusion with a similarly named company. Arguing with the assistant rarely helps, because it is repeating something it read. Find the source through your citations column, correct it, make the right version unambiguous on your own site, then re-check over the following weeks. If it persists, our post on AI brand reputation covers what to do next.
How many questions should I track?
Start with eight to ten and grow only when you have a reason. Most small businesses have a handful of questions that genuinely drive enquiries and a long tail that does not. Add one when a customer asks something you had not thought of.
What if a competitor is always named and I never am?
That is useful information. Read those answers and look at what the assistant cites. Usually it is a specific set of sources: a directory you are not on, a comparison article you are missing from, a review platform where they have two hundred reviews and you have nine. Closing that gap one source at a time is the job.
