Does your business show up in AI search? (And how to check.)

Your next customer might never see a search results page. They’ll ask ChatGPT “who’s a good bilingual web designer in Melbourne?”, read the three names it gives back, and email one of them. If you’re not one of the three, you didn’t lose the deal — you were never in the room.

So the first question isn’t “how do I rank?” It’s “do I even show up?” Here’s how to find out in ten minutes.

Run the prompts your buyers would

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI overviews, and ask the way a customer would — not by your business name:

• “Best [your service] in [your city]”
• “Who should I hire to [the job you do]?”
• the same questions in Mandarin, if you serve Chinese-speaking customers

Note who gets named, who gets cited with a link, and whether you appear at all. Run each a few times — answers vary.

Read what it’s telling you

Three outcomes:

• You’re named and linked. Good — now defend it and widen the queries you win.
• Competitors are named, you’re not. The model knows your category but doesn’t know you yet. That’s an entity + content gap.
• It invents things or pulls outdated info about you. Worse than absence — and a sign your information across the web is thin or contradictory.

Why you’re missing (and the fixes)

AI engines cite sources they can extract cleanly and trust. If you’re absent, it’s usually one of these:

1. Nothing quotable on your site. Vague marketing prose can’t be lifted. Answer real questions in plain, self-contained sentences — an FAQ is gold.
2. No machine-readable signals. Structured data plus an llms.txt tell engines what you do, in plain language.
3. A thin entity. The model builds a picture of you from many places — your site, LinkedIn, directories, reviews. If those are sparse or contradict each other, you don’t get trusted. Make your name, description and facts identical everywhere.
4. No third-party mentions. Being talked about elsewhere — listicles, directories, press — is how a model gains the confidence to name you.

Check it on a schedule

This isn’t set-and-forget. Re-run your prompts monthly — the models update, competitors move, and the queries that matter shift. Treat “are we cited?” as a metric you watch, the same way you’d track rankings.

Showing up in AI answers is the new front page. If you want a second pair of eyes, our free audit checks exactly this — whether ChatGPT and Perplexity can find and cite you, and what’s standing in the way.