Platform
ChatGPT visibility
Conversational assistants are where buyers ask for a recommendation outright — and get a shortlist of names, not ten blue links. Here is what makes a business surface in those answers, which signals you control, and how to find out where you stand today.
AI Says audits your website — the foundation every AI platform draws on. To see what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Google AI are saying about you today, our specialists review those platforms directly during a consultation. AI Says is independent and is not connected to any AI platform.
Two very different ways you get described
A conversational assistant has two sources for anything it says about your business, and the difference between them explains most of what businesses find confusing about their own AI visibility.
The first source is the model itself — a compressed internal representation built during training. When the assistant judges that it already knows enough, it answers from that, and nothing is fetched. Descriptions produced this way are fluent, confident and potentially years out of date. They are also the hardest to influence, because changing them means changing what the public web says about you before the next training cycle, not merely changing your own site.
The second source is retrieval. When the question is specific, local, recent or commercially loaded, the assistant reaches for live sources. This is where your website can matter directly — but only if it is retrievable, resolvable as a business entity and written in a way that yields an extractable answer. Retrieval also means the assistant issues its own search queries, not your customer’s words, so the phrasing you have optimised for may never be the phrasing used.
Why specific questions favour specific businesses
Ask an assistant for “the best accountant” and it will hedge, because the question has no resolvable answer. Ask for “an accountant in Newcastle who handles construction subcontractors” and it must name somebody. Narrow, qualified questions are where small and mid-sized businesses are genuinely competitive — and they are the questions most businesses have never tested.
Step 2 — talk to an expert
See what ChatGPT actually says about you
In a consultation, a specialist puts your customers’ questions to ChatGPT, records what comes back, checks every claim about you for accuracy and researches which competitors are being named instead.
You get interpretation and a plan, not just a screenshot of one answer.
Book a Call With an ExpertWhat the free audit does measure
The full thirty-two-check website audit, your entity corroboration, your question-coverage gaps and the benchmarking of your competitors’ websites. They are the inputs to whether an assistant can use you at all, and they are measured from public web pages. See the signal list.
In a consultation
Four things a specialist checks on this platform
Conversational assistant. The most common place buyers ask for recommendations. Each one is assessed by asking the platform real buyer questions and reading the answers — which is exactly what happens in the consultation.
- VisibilityWere you mentioned at all?
- Whether your business is named across the buyer questions a customer would actually ask — a category and a location with no brand name in them. This is the blunt measure: you are either in the answer or you are not.
- RecommendationWere you put forward, or just listed?
- Whether you are actively recommended rather than mentioned in passing. The distinction matters commercially: appearing in a list of nine local firms is not the same as being the one the assistant suggests the customer contact.
- CitationWas your own site the source?
- Whether answers cite a URL on your domain. Where an assistant cites a directory or a competitor instead of you on a question about your own services, that is a retrievability problem rather than an awareness problem.
- AccuracyWas what it said true?
- How correct and complete the description of your business is, assessed claim by claim against what is verifiably true. An inaccurate description is usually faster to fix than a missing mention, and it is more damaging while it persists.
A single answer is never treated as a verdict: generative answers vary by platform, model, location, personalisation, prompt wording and time, so a specialist reads a spread of questions rather than one. What the consultation covers.
Practical
What moves the needle for an assistant
Ordered by how directly it affects whether an assistant can include you in a recommendation.
- 1
Make your identity unambiguous
One consistent legal name, one canonical address, Organization schema, and sameAs links to profiles that say the same things. An assistant that cannot resolve which business you are will not name you at all — hedging is always the safer output for it.
- 2
State your qualifiers explicitly
The industries you serve, the customer types, the suburbs or regions, the things you deliberately do not do. Assistants answer qualified questions, and they can only match a qualifier that appears somewhere in words.
- 3
Answer the narrow questions in public
A page that directly answers "how much does X cost in Y" or "what should I ask before hiring a Z" is retrievable for exactly the prompts buyers type. A services page that mentions twelve offerings is retrievable for none of them.
- 4
Get corroborated somewhere other than your own site
Industry bodies, registries, reputable directories, local press, review platforms. Corroboration is what converts "a business claims this" into "this is the case" for a system that has no other way to tell.
- 5
Keep something dated and current
Visible recency gives an assistant a reason to prefer a retrieved fact over its own stale internal one. Static sites are described from memory more often than living ones.
Other surfaces
One assistant is not the whole picture
Each platform retrieves differently, cites at a different rate and therefore tells you something different.
Gemini visibility
Google-adjacent retrieval, plus the separate question of AI Overviews inside search results.
Read the pagePerplexity visibility
Cites its sources by default, which makes it the clearest read on whether your own site is being used.
Read the pageMonitoring over time
Assistant behaviour changes between model releases, so one reading is a snapshot. Today, tracking over time is done with a specialist.
Read the page
Questions
Questions about ChatGPT visibility
ChatGPT often answers from what the model learned during training rather than fetching your site live, so recent changes can take time to show through. When an assistant judges that it already knows enough, it relies on its internal picture of the web at training time; a rebrand, new service line or move to new premises only appears once retrieval is triggered or the model is updated. Keeping your key facts consistent across your site and reputable third-party profiles gives both routes the same, current story.
Assistants name the businesses they can identify with confidence and see corroborated by independent sources. For a specific local or niche question, that usually means an unambiguous entity — consistent name, address and services, backed by structured data and profiles elsewhere. For broader questions, the businesses named tend to be those written about most in the sources the assistant can reach, which is why directory listings, reviews and industry coverage matter as much as your own pages.
Organic ChatGPT answers are earned through the signals an assistant trusts, which is where your effort pays off. Be sceptical of anyone selling guaranteed placement. What you can do is remove every reason an assistant would pass you over: make your identity resolvable, get corroborated on reputable sites, state plainly what you do and where, and publish pages with answers worth quoting.
Ask the questions your customers ask — a service, a location, a type of customer — without your brand name in them. Asking about your business by name almost always produces a description, because the question supplies the identity. The revealing test is whether you appear at all when a buyer asks an unbranded question, and that is the method a specialist uses in a consultation.
The audit tells you whether your website gives an assistant what it needs to find, understand and quote you. It checks whether your pages can be retrieved and indexed, whether your identity resolves unambiguously, whether your services and market are stated in words a machine can match, whether your content is shaped as extractable answers, and whether anything corroborates you elsewhere. Those are the preconditions for being named, scored as your AI Readiness Score with a prioritised fix list.
Book a consultation and a specialist will review ChatGPT directly with you. They put your customers’ real questions to the platform, record whether you are mentioned, recommended or cited, check what is said about you for accuracy, and research which competitors are being named instead — alongside the same review for Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Booking is free.
AI Says is fully independent. AI Says is not affiliated with or endorsed by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity or other AI/search providers. Platform names are used descriptively to identify the services being assessed.
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