Ask AI who to hire. It names three businesses.
If yours is not one of them, you are never even considered. We find out why, and fix it.
Example only. These companies are made up.
An example, not a real search. Three AI assistants are asked to recommend a supplier. Each one answers with a short list of businesses, taken from review sites, Reddit and Wikipedia. The business being checked is missing from all three answers.
It never opened your website.
the answer you were shown
Northwind Billing · Oakhaven Software · Marlowe & Finch · Fenwick Systems
it built that list from
- g2.com
- reddit.com
- capterra.com
- wikipedia.org
- trustradius.com
your-website.com
never opened
So this is what we check
Eight things, checked live on the call. Most businesses fail the same three, and none of them are about how your website looks.
Can AI read you?
If it cannot get to your site, nothing else on this list matters.
- AI is allowed to visit your site
- not sure
- Your security settings are not turning it away
- not sure
- Your words are on the page, not built by code
- partly
Does anyone else mention you?
This is where the answer comes from. Almost never your own site.
- You are on the review sites people use
- no
- Someone has put you on a best-of list
- no
- People other than you write about you
- barely
Are you easy to quote?
AI copies a sentence or two. Yours have to be worth copying.
- Your pages answer the question straight away
- buried
- You say things specific enough to repeat
- too vague
Want us to run these on your business?
What actually changed
A lot of what gets said about AI search is guesswork repeated until it sounds true. Every number below says who measured it and how many things they looked at, so you can check it yourself.
- 4 in 10Google searches now show an AI answer at the top
Counted on searches real people typed while going about their day, not a list of words picked to make the number look impressive.
Agarwal & Sen, 68,089 searches, 2026
- 40% fewerpeople click through to any website when it appears
They read the answer and stop. This one comes from a proper experiment where people were split into groups at random, so it shows the AI answer is the cause and not just something that happens alongside. A separate study by Pew found the same thing a different way.
Agarwal & Sen 2026 · Pew Research 2025
- 6 in 10businesses Google's AI quotes are not in its own top ten results
Nearly a third are not even in the top hundred. Being good at Google and being named by AI have come apart, so you can hold every ranking you have and still go unmentioned.
Ahrefs, 863,000 result pages, 2026
- 1 in 4sources stay the same if you ask the question twice
Only about a quarter of what ChatGPT quotes stays the same when you ask again the same day. So one lucky check proves nothing, nobody can sell you a ranking, and the only honest measure is asking many questions many times.
University of St. Gallen, 3,409 paired runs, 2026
How it goes
no signup · no scan tool · no email wall
A free 15-minute check
We ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity about your business while you watch, and about two competitors you pick. If nothing is wrong, we will tell you that and you can get on with your day.
6–8 weeks · fixed fee
A fixed-fee sprint
We fix what the check found: getting AI able to read you, getting you onto the sites it quotes, and rewriting the pages that should be answering your customers' questions but are not.
monthly · cancel anytime
Monitoring, if you want it
We keep checking each month and tell you when something moves. Only worth paying for once there is something to protect.
Straight answers
The basics
- What is AI visibility?
- Whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers name your business when someone asks them a question you should be the answer to. It is not the same as ranking on Google. You get a short list of a few names instead of a page of ten links, and that list is usually built from other people's websites rather than your own.
- Is this just SEO with a new name?
- Roughly 80% of it is competent, conventional SEO, and any agency that tells you otherwise is selling you something. The assistants ground their answers in a search index, so being findable the old way is most of the job. The remaining fifth is genuinely different: which third-party sources carry your category, whether retrieval crawlers can reach you at all, and whether a passage can be lifted from your page cleanly.
- Does this matter if we still get plenty of Google traffic?
- That is the usual reason to look now rather than later. The pattern people report is traffic holding up while the conversations that used to start on your site start somewhere else instead, so the first visible symptom is often a change in lead quality rather than a change in volume. Checking costs you a quarter of an hour.
What actually works
- Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend us?
- No, and anyone who does is selling you something. Nobody controls model output, and the same prompt asked twice rarely returns the same list of brands in the same order. What we can do is fix the inputs the systems demonstrably draw on, then measure presence across many prompts over time rather than quoting you a position.
- Do we need an llms.txt file?
- No. It is the most-sold deliverable in this field and there is no evidence any major provider reads it: in a study of 137,000 domains, 97% of these files received no requests at all in a month, and the ones that were fetched were mostly hit by SEO audit tools. Google has said its systems do not use them. We will not bill you for one.
- Will adding schema markup get us cited?
- Probably not on its own. It is worth having for ordinary search results, and it helps machines parse you, but the one properly controlled study on this found no citation benefit and a slight decline on Google's AI Overviews. We treat structured data as hygiene, not as the lever, and we would rather spend your budget where the evidence is stronger.
- What about the tools that give you an AI visibility score?
- Treat any single score with suspicion, especially a ranking position. Assistants are non-deterministic, so a presence rate is only meaningful measured across many prompts run many times, and most affordable tools sample far too thinly to distinguish a real change from noise. A number that moves ten points between months has usually not measured anything.
- Should we block AI crawlers?
- Find out which one you are blocking first. Each company runs two: one that collects text to train the AI, and one that fetches pages to answer questions. Blocking the first is a fair business decision and costs you almost nothing. Blocking the second removes you from that assistant's answers completely. The block lists people copy off the internet do not tell them apart, so they usually do the damaging one by accident.
Working together
- How long before anything changes?
- Access problems are the fastest: if a firewall or a robots rule is blocking retrieval crawlers, fixing it can show up within weeks. Getting into the third-party sources that assistants actually quote is slower, usually a couple of months, because it depends on other people publishing. Anyone promising results in days is describing something else.
- What does the sprint cost?
- The sprint is fixed-fee and scoped on the review call, because the work differs enormously depending on what the diagnostic finds. We will give you the number before you commit to anything, and the review itself is free either way.
- Do we need to be technical for this to work?
- No. Some of the work is technical and we handle that. The rest is editorial and depends on you: someone who can answer questions about the business, approve copy, and say yes to being written about. If you have a developer we will work with them directly; if you do not, we will do it.
- What happens on the free review?
- We run your brand and two competitors you name through the assistants while you watch, and read the results back. You leave with the notes whether or not you hire us. It is fifteen minutes, there is no deck, and if we cannot see a problem worth paying to fix we will tell you on the call.
Find out what they say about you.
Fifteen minutes, no slides. Run by Don Wishvantha, who will be the one on the call.
What happens
- we ask three AI assistants about your business, live
- we do the same for two competitors you name
- we explain what is causing the gap
- you leave with the notes, whether or not you hire us
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