Here is a question most business owners have never asked, and probably should. When a potential customer types your business name, or your category, into ChatGPT, what does it tell them? Because they are doing it. More people every month are asking an AI tool "who is a good X near me" or "is this company any good" before they ever reach your website or pick up the phone.
You have spent years thinking about what Google says about you. Almost nobody has checked what the AI tools say. And the answers are often wrong, out of date, or simply blank. That is worth ten minutes of your time to find out, so let me walk you through the audit.
Run the audit yourself
You do not need any special software. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, because they draw on different sources and will not agree, and ask each of them the same set of questions. Three types are worth covering.
- Your brand directly. "What can you tell me about [your business name] in Norwich?" See whether it knows you exist, whether the details are right, and what tone it takes.
- Your category and location. "Who are the best [your service] companies in Norwich?" or "recommend a [your service] in Norfolk." See whether you appear at all, and who does.
- The buying question. Ask the way a real customer would: "I need [the problem you solve], who should I talk to near me and what should I look for?"
Write down what comes back. Do it in a fresh chat each time so old context does not skew the answer. Within twenty minutes you will have a clear, and often uncomfortable, picture of your AI presence.
Why the answers are often wrong
The results tend to fall into a few unhappy categories, and it helps to know why.
Sometimes the tool has never heard of you. If your online presence is thin, there is nothing for it to draw on, so you are absent from a conversation your competitors are winning. Sometimes it confidently states things that are stale: an old address, a service you dropped two years ago, a phone number that changed. And sometimes it recommends competitors, often the ones with the strongest, clearest presence online rather than the best businesses.
The reason is simple. These models are not looking you up live and thinking hard about you. They are drawing on a mix of what they learned during training and, for the tools that browse, what they can retrieve from the web right now. If the public information about you is thin, dated or contradictory, that is exactly what you get back. Garbage in, confident garbage out.
Where the models get their information
This is the part that turns a scary audit into a fixable problem. The AI tools are not pulling their answers from some secret source. They are largely reading the same web the rest of us use. In practice that means:
- Your own website, if it is clear about who you are, what you do and where you operate.
- Your Google Business Profile and the main directories.
- Reviews and third-party mentions.
- Structured, consistent information about your business across all of these.
If those signals are strong and consistent, the models tend to get you right. If your name, address and services say three different things across three sites, the model has no way to know which is true, so it guesses or leaves you out. The AI layer is only as good as the web layer underneath it, and that web layer is something you can actually control.
The fix loops back to fundamentals
Here is the reassuring part. There is no separate "AI marketing" you need to go and buy. The work that gets you accurate, favourable AI answers is the same work that has always driven good search visibility, done properly.
- Make your website unambiguous about who you are, what you offer, and the areas you serve. Clear entity signals help the model understand you.
- Keep your name, address, phone and services identical everywhere they appear. Consistency is what lets a model trust the data.
- Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current.
- Earn genuine mentions on sites that matter in your field. That is how trust and recognition are built, for search engines and AI alike.
- Answer real customer questions on your site in plain language, so there is something quotable for the tools to lift.
This is SEO, with an eye on how AI surfaces read the same information. Some people call the AI-facing version GEO. The inputs are almost identical. Fix the fundamentals and both improve together.
Do the audit this week
The point of this post is not to alarm you. It is to get you to actually check, because most of your competitors have not. Spend twenty minutes asking the three tools about your business and your category. If the answers are wrong or you are missing entirely, that is a to-do list, not a crisis.
If you would like help closing the gaps the audit turns up, improving what the AI tools say about you is part of our SEO and AI search work, and we are happy to run the audit with you.