AI visibility: how to tell if ChatGPT and Google's AI recommend you

Something quietly shifted in the last couple of years. A growing number of your customers no longer start with a Google search box. They open ChatGPT, or they read the AI-written answer that now sits at the top of Google, and they ask it something like "who is the best plumber near me" or "what is a good family dentist in town." If the AI names a few businesses and yours is not among them, you have lost that customer before you even knew they were looking.

So the natural question owners ask me is: "Does ChatGPT recommend my business, and how would I even know?" I want to answer that honestly, because there is a lot of hype and some outright nonsense being sold around "AI SEO" right now. The truth is more modest, and more useful, than the pitch.

The honest truth: there is no AI rank tracker

Let us clear this up first, because it matters. For traditional Google search, you can track exactly where you rank for a given phrase. For AI answers from ChatGPT or Google's AI overviews, there is no official, reliable rank tracker. Anyone selling you a dashboard that claims to show your precise "ChatGPT ranking" is overstating what is actually possible. AI answers vary from person to person, phrasing to phrasing, and day to day. They are not a fixed leaderboard you can climb.

That does not mean you are helpless. It means the honest method is different, and refreshingly low-tech.

How to actually check your AI visibility

The method is simple, and I want you to do it yourself this week rather than trust anyone's dashboard. Think like your customer and interrogate the AI tools the way they would.

Step 1: Write down the questions a customer would ask

Not the fancy keywords a marketer would use. The real, messy, spoken questions. Things like "best coffee shop near the station," "affordable emergency electrician in my area," or "who does gluten-free birthday cakes here." Write five to ten of these.

Step 2: Ask the AI tools those exact questions

Open ChatGPT and ask each one. Do the same in Google, where an AI-written overview often appears at the top for these kinds of questions. Where relevant, include your town or neighborhood, because that is how a real local customer would phrase it.

Step 3: Note whether you appear, and who does

For each question, write down whether the AI mentioned your business, and if not, which competitors it named instead. When I run this exercise with clients, the results are always illuminating. Sometimes a business they had never worried about keeps coming up, and sometimes the AI recommends an outdated or wrong detail about them, which is its own useful thing to discover.

Step 4: Repeat it every so often

Because answers shift over time, treat this as a periodic check rather than a one-time score. A few minutes once a month tells you far more than any tool promising a single magic number.

Why the AI mentions some businesses and not others

Here is the reassuring part. The things that make AI tools mention you are, for the most part, the same things that make you rank well in ordinary search and win real customers. These AI systems are trained on and draw from the open web, so they tend to surface businesses that are clearly described, well reviewed, and frequently referenced. In practice that means:

• Clear, helpful, well-structured content. Pages that plainly answer real customer questions give the AI something concrete to quote. This is exactly what Google describes in its guidance on creating helpful, reliable content.
• Strong, plentiful reviews. Businesses with many genuine positive reviews get referenced more, because that reputation shows up across the web the AI reads.
• Consistent information everywhere. Your name, address, and services should match across your site, your Google Business Profile, and directories, so the AI is not confused about who you are.
• Being cited and mentioned by others. Local news, directories, and other sites mentioning you all feed the picture the AI builds.

Notice what is not on that list: tricks, keyword stuffing, or paying for a shortcut. There is no secret backdoor into the AI's recommendations. There is only being genuinely, clearly, and verifiably good at what you do, and making that easy to find.

How this connects to your regular SEO

This is the point I most want owners to take away. Improving your AI visibility is not a separate project with its own strange rules. The clear content, honest reviews, consistent details, and healthy website that help you in AI answers are the exact same things that help you in normal search. Doing the fundamentals well pays off in both places at once. If you want a simple routine for those fundamentals, our guide to SEO for business owners with no time lays out a thirty-minute weekly version.

So do not let the "AI is coming" panic push you into buying gimmicks. The businesses that AI tools recommend tomorrow are, overwhelmingly, the ones doing solid, honest, helpful work today and describing it clearly online.

What to do this week

• Write down five to ten real questions a customer would ask an AI to find a business like yours.
• Ask those questions in ChatGPT and in Google, including your location, and note whether you appear.
• Record which competitors get mentioned, and whether any facts about you are wrong or out of date.
• Pick one gap, such as a missing page that answers a common question, and fill it clearly and honestly.
• Put a monthly reminder in your calendar to repeat this quick check, since AI answers change over time.