AI Visibility Checker

Your Google ranking and your AI visibility are two different things

AI visibility is whether — and how accurately — assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity name your business when someone asks for a recommendation in your category and area. It is not the same as ranking on Google. A business can sit on page one for dozens of keywords and still never get mentioned when a buyer asks an AI assistant "who's the best [your service] near me." The two channels run on different signals: Google returns a list you can scroll; an AI assistant returns a single synthesized answer naming a few brands. There is no page two. For a local business, not being named is the same as not being there.

Why AI visibility matters more for local businesses

When someone searches Google for a plumber, they still see ten results and pick one. When they ask ChatGPT or read a Google AI Overview, they often get one short answer with two or three names in it. If yours isn't one of them, the buyer never sees you — and they're often asking before they've chosen anyone, which is exactly when the decision is still up for grabs. Category and problem questions ("best HVAC company in Detroit," "who fixes a slab leak fast") carry the most revenue for this reason. Local makes it sharper: AI answers weight location relevance heavily, and the surfaces feeding those answers — your Google Business Profile, your listings, your reviews — are local signals you can actually control.

How we check your AI visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity

The manual version is simple and worth doing once: open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, and type the questions a real customer would ask — not your business name, but category, problem, and "near me" phrasings. Then check the Google results for an AI Overview on the same queries. Note three things each time, because visibility isn't yes/no — it's three levels:

• Mentioned — your name appears at all.
• Accurate — the name, services, and location are correct (assistants often pull stale data).
• Recommended — you're named as a top choice, not a footnote.

This tool runs that check for you across the major assistants and the Google AI surfaces, then shows you the result here so you have a baseline to compare against later. It reads the same signals the models do — what's published about you, how consistent it is, and how often your business shows up in the context of your category and city.

What your AI Visibility Score means

Your score is a single number that tells you where you stand right now.

• 0–29 — Largely invisible. Across most of the queries your customers ask, an assistant either names no one specific or names competitors. You're handing those conversations away. This is urgent if buyers in your market already use AI to shortlist — and they do.
• 30–59 — A foothold with gaps. You surface on some platforms or some query types but not others, or you're mentioned but not recommended. This is where most local businesses land. The gaps are usually concentrated — often the category and problem queries that carry the most revenue — which makes them targetable.
• 60–100 — Solid AI presence. You're named, accurate, and recommended across most queries and platforms. The work shifts from getting found to defending the position as models update and competitors push to displace you.

A score is a snapshot, not a verdict. What moves the needle is which specific queries and platforms you're missing — which is what the report breaks out.

What's in your AI Visibility report

The report shows you, per platform: whether you were mentioned, the AI's response snippet so you can see how you're being described, and the competitors named alongside you. You get your overall score and the specific platforms dragging it down, so you're not guessing where to start. It's a record you can keep and compare against next month, which matters more than it sounds — because this number doesn't hold still.

Why AI visibility scores change (and how often to re-check)

AI visibility decays. The same question can name you this month and skip you next month as models update, as new content gets indexed, and as competitors publish. There's a well-documented pattern where citations fade after roughly three months without fresh signals. So treat this like a vital sign, not a one-time audit. Re-run it monthly, watch your share of the answers move over time, and flag the moment a competitor displaces you on a query that matters. This is the blind spot most owners have: years of habit watching Google Analytics, and no equivalent window into what the assistants are saying about them.

How to improve a low AI Visibility Score

A low or patchy score almost always traces to a short list of fixable causes:

• Your Google Business Profile is thin. For local queries this is the strongest signal you control. Completeness means a granular services list (not "plumbing" but "tankless water heater install," "main line camera inspection"), tight categories, current hours, photos under a month old, and regular posts. Assistants increasingly read these fields directly — and as agentic booking rolls out, the agent deciding whether to contact you reads them too. If this is your gap, the GBP Health Check tool tells you exactly what's missing.
• Your business facts conflict across the web. If your name, address, and phone don't match across your site, listings, and directories, models hedge toward the competitor with the cleaner footprint. Fix NAP consistency first.
• AI can't read or trust your site. Add LocalBusiness schema (JSON-LD) so your facts are machine-extractable — the Schema Generator produces it — and confirm your robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking the AI crawlers: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, GoogleOther, and PerplexityBot. Blocking them closes the door before the model knocks.
• You're absent from the sources AI trusts. If the assistants keep citing a "best [category] in [city]" roundup you're not in, that's the lever. Earning mentions in the pages and profiles they already trust is the slow, durable fix.

Checking one location by hand across four assistants takes about ten minutes. If you manage multiple locations — or you're an agency tracking a roster of clients — the manual method doesn't scale, and that's what the Local SEO Data API is for: /v1/ai/visibility returns the score per business and /v1/ai/compare lines you up against named competitors, so you can run hundreds of locations on a schedule.

Frequently asked questions