What we ask AI, and how we read the answers.

1. We find your business on Google

You type your business name and pick it from Google’s list. No website, account or setup needed. Google’s public listing (your category, city, phone, hours, address, rating and review count) becomes the reference we compare every AI answer against.

2. We ask the questions customers ask

Every check asks five questions. For a plumber in Tulsa, they look like this:

1. “What’s the best plumber in Tulsa?”
2. “Who should I call for a plumbing emergency in Tulsa?”
3. “Who’s the most trustworthy plumber in Tulsa?”
4. “What are the hours, phone number and address for [your business] in Tulsa?”
5. “Is [your business] in Tulsa any good? What do customers say about them?”

The first three are discovery questions: the ones where a customer doesn’t know you yet. They’re phrased the way people ask for your type of business, so a dentist gets “a good dentist that takes new patients” and a restaurant gets “where should I eat tonight”. The last two name you directly, to see what AI says when a customer already has your name.

We ask all five to ChatGPT (with web search on), Perplexity and Gemini (grounded in Google Search): the same way a customer’s question would reach them.

3. We read every answer

• Are you recommended? We count how many discovery answers name you, per assistant, allowing for the variations of your name that answers use.
• Who’s recommended instead? Every other business named is collected and ranked by how often it came up, with its Google rating and review count next to yours.
• Are the facts right? Hours, phone number and address from each answer are compared with your Google listing. A wrong phone number or old hours gets flagged, with which assistant said it.

4. We check where AI looks

AI assistants build local answers from a small set of sources: map listings, review sites, directories and your own website. We check whether you’re on the ones we can verify (Google, Yelp and your website, including whether AI crawlers are allowed to read it) and tell you plainly which ones we couldn’t check automatically, such as Bing Places and Apple Maps, rather than guessing.

You can run the website part on its own with our free AI website check.

5. You get three fixes, easiest first

Everything we found maps to a specific fix: correct the hours AI is quoting, claim your Bing Places or Apple Business Connect listing, get listed on Yelp, let AI crawlers read your website, or close a big review gap with the competitors AI prefers. Each fix says why it matters, the exact steps, and roughly how long it takes. Your report leads with the three that are easiest and most likely to change the answer.

Why answers change from week to week

AI assistants don’t give the same answer every time. They search the web fresh, their models are updated, and two people asking the same question can get different businesses. A single check is a snapshot, not a verdict.

That’s what Watch is for. It asks the same questions every week and emails you only when something changes: an assistant stops recommending you, a new competitor appears, or a fact about you goes wrong. If nothing changed, you don’t hear from us.

What we never do

• Contact your customers, post reviews or post anything as you.
• Send your email address to an AI provider. They only see your business’s public details.
• Promise you a ranking. Nobody controls what an AI assistant says; we show you what it relies on.