How to check how
AI systems
describe your
business (without
paying for software).

A growing share of your customers now receive an answer from an AI system before they ever click through to a website. They ask for a recommendation, read what the AI tells them, and act on it. Most business owners have never seen what those systems say about them. The aim of this article is simple and practical: to show you how to look, and just as importantly, how to read what you find. This is about observation, not diagnosis. You are gathering what you see, not jumping to conclusions.

Why this matters

We covered the bigger shift in why your site needs to rank in ChatGPT, not just Google. The short version: AI assistants increasingly sit between your customer and your website, summarising and recommending before anyone visits a page. Knowing how those systems currently describe you is now part of understanding your own presence. It is not cause for alarm, it is simply something worth seeing for yourself.

The five AI systems to check

Check the places your customers are most likely to use:

ChatGPT — the one most people reach for by name.
Google AI Overviews — the AI answer that now appears above ordinary Google results.
Gemini — Google's standalone assistant.
Perplexity — an answer engine that cites its sources directly.
Grok — X's assistant, increasingly used for recommendations.

Each is built on different data sources and updated on a different schedule, so the same question can produce different answers in each. That difference is the point: you are looking for a pattern across all five, not a verdict from any one.

Depending on your customers and industry, you may also want to check Microsoft Copilot and Claude. Start with the five above, then add these if they are relevant to how your customers search.

Ask the right questions

The instinct is to ask one question, like "who is the best accountant in Byron Bay?" That is a start, but it only shows you one slice. Customers phrase things many ways, so test several types of question:

Best — "best [your service] in [your area]"
Top — "top [your service] providers near [location]"
Recommended — "recommend a [your service] in [your area]"
Compare — "compare [your service] options in [location]"
Alternative to — "alternatives to [a known competitor]"
Who specialises in — "who specialises in [specific problem] in [area]"

Keep the list fixed and use the same questions across all five systems, in fresh, logged-out sessions with personalisation and memory off, so you see what a new customer sees rather than what a system has learned about you.

Record your observations

Write down what you see. A simple worksheet turns scattered impressions into something you can read:

Fill one row per system, repeating across your set of questions. The notes column is where the useful detail lives: exactly how you were described, which competitor came up, which source was cited.

What to look for

This is where the exercise becomes genuinely useful. These are patterns to observe, not conclusions to draw. Note them as things you saw:

You are never mentioned. Across questions and systems, your business does not come up.
Only directories are cited. The AI points to listing sites rather than to you directly.
Competitors appear repeatedly. The same other names recur where you do not.
Outdated information appears. An old location, a former service, a previous name.
The AI confuses your business. It blends you with another company or gets your specialty wrong.
Another brand is credited with your work. Something you did is attributed elsewhere.

Each of these is an observation. None of them, on its own, is a diagnosis. A single missed prompt does not mean you are absent everywhere; it means that one system, asked that one way, on that one day, did not surface you. The value is in the pattern across the whole worksheet, not any single cell.

What this snapshot can't tell you

Here is the honest limit of the exercise. Today's answers are a snapshot in time. AI responses vary between systems and can change as models, indexes and content evolve. A single check tells you what happened today. It does not tell you whether your visibility is improving or declining over time. For that you need to repeat a fixed set of checks on a regular schedule and watch the trend, which is a different exercise. We covered how to approach that in how to track ChatGPT rankings over time.

For now, the snapshot answers the question most owners actually have: how do these systems describe my business right now? Whatever you find, you will know more than most of your competitors, who have never looked.