Ask ChatGPT to recommend a plumber in your town. Or an HVAC company, a real estate agent, a dentist. Somebody gets named. It might be you. It might be your competitor. It might be a business that closed two years ago.
Most owners have never checked. It takes about ten minutes, and it is the most useful ten minutes you will spend on your marketing this week.
Step one: go and ask
Open ChatGPT. Then do the same in Google’s AI results, Perplexity, and Copilot. Different systems read different things, and you want to see the spread rather than one opinion.
Ask what a customer would ask, not what you would ask:
- Who is the best [your trade] in [your town]?
- I need [specific problem] fixed in [your town]. Who should I call?
- Is [your business name] any good?
- What does [your business name] charge?
- [Your business name] vs [competitor name]
Screenshot everything. Ask the same question twice, because you will not always get the same answer.
Step two: work out which problem you have
There are only four, and they need different fixes.
You are not mentioned at all. The most common result, and the least alarming. It usually means there is not enough clear information about you in the places these systems read.
You are mentioned and it is wrong. Old hours, an address you moved out of, a service you dropped, a phone number that rings nowhere. This is the urgent one, because it is actively sending your customers somewhere else.
You are mentioned and it is vague. “There are several well reviewed options in the area, including…” with your name fifth in a list. Better than nothing, but you are wallpaper.
Your competitor is the answer. Read that one closely. Whatever the model says about them is what it found easy to say. That is a free brief.
Step three: understand why it said that
None of these systems know anything about your business first-hand. They assembled an answer out of what they could find and what they were willing to trust. That means the answer is downstream of a few unglamorous things.
Your Google Business Profile. Still the anchor for anything local. Thin, stale, or missing categories means you handed over a weak source.
Consistency across the web. Your hours, address, phone and services as they appear on your site, your profile, and every directory that lists you. Where those disagree, you become risky to quote.
Reviews, and the words inside them. Not just the count. Reviews describe your business in customer language, which is the language people type.
What your own pages actually claim. If your service page says you are a trusted partner in home comfort, there is nothing there to lift. If it says you do same-day AC repair across Hillsborough and Pasco, seven days a week, that is a sentence a machine can repeat without risk.
Mentions you do not own. Local press, manufacturer and supplier pages, association listings, forum threads. Those carry weight precisely because you did not write them.
Step four: fix the causes, in this order
- Correct anything factually wrong. Google Business Profile first, then your site, then the directories. Wrong information is worse than no information.
- Make your pages say something specific. What you do, where, for whom, roughly what it costs, and what you do not take on. Plain sentences. Commit to things.
- Add structured data that matches those pages. Schema is how you state plainly what a machine would otherwise have to guess at, and guessing is where it gets you wrong.
- Ask for reviews and stop steering them. One review naming the actual job beats five that say great service.
- Answer real questions on your site. The question as the heading, the answer in the first sentence underneath. That is most of what answer engine optimisation actually is.
What you cannot control
You cannot make an AI say a particular thing about you, any more than you can make Google rank you first. Anyone promising otherwise is selling something.
What you can do is become the easiest business in your category to describe accurately. That turns out to be most of the battle, and it has the useful side effect of making your website better for the humans reading it.
How often to check
Once a quarter is enough for most businesses. Sooner if you move, change your hours, drop a service, or add one. Keep the screenshots. The value is not in the snapshot, it is in the direction over time.
The awkward part
Most businesses I check are being described to potential customers using information the owner has not looked at in three years. It is nobody’s fault. Until recently there was no reason to care what a chatbot thought about you.
There is now.
I do SEO, AEO and GEO for small and medium businesses around Tampa, and I take on a short list of clients on the side of my agency job. No contracts. If you want me to run this check on your business and tell you what I find, send me your site.
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