What AI assistants say about your business, and how to check in five minutes

Some of your customers now ask an AI assistant before they open a search engine, or read the AI summary at the top of Google instead of clicking through. They type "who repairs hydraulic presses near Grand Rapids" or "what does this company charge for a kitchen remodel" into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity, and they act on the answer. If the answer is wrong, out of date, or names your competitor, you never find out. The customer simply never calls.

The good news is that you can see those answers yourself in about five minutes, and much of what drives them is under your control.

The five-minute check

Open two or three AI assistants. The free versions are usually enough. Paste in each of these, with your own company and city filled in:

1. "What does [company name] in [city] do?"
2. "I need [the thing you sell] in [city]. Who should I call?"
3. "How much does [company name] charge for [your main service]?"
4. "How do I contact [company name]?"

For each answer, note four things:

• Wrong. A service you do not offer, a location you left years ago, an owner who sold the business.
• Missing. You are not named at all, or a competitor is named instead.
• Vague. "They appear to offer a range of services." That is what an assistant says when your website never states plainly what you do.
• Dead ends. A phone number that no longer rings, a contact page that is only a form the assistant cannot fill in.

Write the misses down. That list is your fix list. Two cautions: assistants do not give the same answer every time, so ask each question twice, and note whether the tool showed live web sources or answered from memory, because a tool without web search can only repeat what it learned in the past. For a quick extra read, search your company name on Google and look at the AI summary above the results, if one appears.

Where the answers come from

AI assistants do not keep a file on your business. Their answers draw on what is published about you, and which sources a given tool leans on varies by tool and by question. They tend to fall into three groups:

1. Your own website. This is the biggest lever. An assistant can only repeat what a page says plainly: what you do, where you do it, what it costs or roughly costs, and how to reach you. A homepage that opens with a slogan and a stock photo gives them nothing to work with.
2. Listings that should agree with each other. Your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn page, industry directories, and the chamber of commerce listing. When these disagree on your name, address, or phone number, an assistant may hedge or pick the wrong one.
3. What other people say. Reviews, news mentions, supplier and customer pages that link to you. These count as independent evidence, because you did not write them.

Three fixes you can make this week

Say what you do in one plain paragraph, above the fold. Not the mission statement. The sentence you would use on the phone: "We machine replacement parts for food-processing lines, same week, within 100 miles of Grand Rapids." Put it on the homepage and the about page.

Publish prices or price ranges. Buyers ask assistants about cost constantly. If your site is silent, the assistant either guesses or sends them to a competitor whose page answers the question. A range with a short explanation of what moves the price is enough.

Make your contact details consistent and complete everywhere. Same business name, same phone number, same hours on your site, your Google Business Profile, and every directory. If you work from a home office, Google lets you list a service area instead of a street address. Add a contact form that a person or an assistant can actually complete, and keep the email and phone number visible next to it.

Fixes that take longer, and pay longer

• A short, plain frequently asked questions section answering the questions you hear on the phone. Assistants can quote these directly.
• Structured data, the machine-readable version of your name, services, prices, and service area that lives in the page code. Your web developer can usually add it without redesigning anything. It helps search engines understand the page, and some assistants may use it too, though no tool promises to.
• A page per service with its own plain description and price range, rather than one long list.

When to get help

If your five-minute check turned up mostly "vague" and "missing," the fixes above will move the needle, and you can do most of them yourself. If it turned up "wrong," especially a competitor named in your place or an old address, it is worth a proper look at every source the assistants are reading. That is what our AI search visibility audit does: we record what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity say about you today, compare it with your competitors, and make the quick fixes on your site as part of the work.

Either way, run the check again in a month. How quickly an assistant reflects a change varies, and some lag for weeks or months, but the before-and-after is the only proof that matters.