What Does AI Say About My Business? How to Check (and Fix What You Find)

To check what AI says about your business, ask AI tools the questions your customers ask — "who's the best [your service] in [your city]?", "is [your business name] reputable?" — across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, several times each, and record what comes back. Or automate it: our free scan does exactly this and returns every answer with receipts. Either way, the answers already exist. The only question is whether you've seen them before your customers act on them.

We run this check professionally — our software, Radar, observes AI answers about local businesses every day — and the results surprise owners in both directions. Businesses with great reputations discover AI never mentions them. Businesses that assume AI is a fad discover it's confidently telling people they're closed. Here's how to run the check yourself, what you'll find, and what to do about each outcome.

Why this matters now (briefly, without the hype)

Customers have changed how they find businesses. ChatGPT serves roughly 900 million weekly users; Google's AI Overviews appear on about 30% of searches; 68% of US Google searches end without a click (SparkToro, June 2026). When someone asks an AI assistant who to hire, the answer names two to four businesses with a sentence of justification each — synthesized from your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and what the web says about you.

That synthesis is happening whether you participate or not. AI knows about your business what the public web tells it — and it repeats that understanding, right or wrong, across thousands of conversations you never see.

How to check what AI says about your business (manual method)

Fifteen minutes, no tools:

1. Write ten real customer questions. Not "tell me about [business name]" — nobody asks that. Use buying questions: "best family dentist in Mesa for kids", "who should I call for water damage in Tampa at night", "is [your business] any good?", "[your business] vs [competitor]". Our free question generator produces the ten for your trade and city instantly.
2. Ask them across at least three AI platforms. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity behave differently — different sources, different answers. Google's AI Overviews and Copilot round out the picture.
3. Use fresh chats and repeat each question two or three times. AI answers vary run to run; a single response is one sample from a distribution, not a verdict.
4. Record four things per answer: were you named? What exactly was said about you (quote it)? Who was named instead? What sources did the answer cite (Perplexity and Gemini show these; ChatGPT sometimes does)?
5. Ask the direct question too: "What do you know about [business name] in [city]?" This surfaces the factual errors — wrong services, old addresses, stale hours — that recommendation questions hide.

The weaknesses of the manual method are sample size and your own account's personalization. It's a spot check, not measurement — but it beats not looking.

The automated version

Our free AI visibility report runs this process properly: real customer questions for your category and location across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, multiple observations, and a report with recommendation receipts — every question, the full answer text, whether you appeared, competitors ranked by mentions, verbatim quotes of what AI says about you, and the sources behind it all. Takes about three minutes, no signup to see results. Run it here.

The four outcomes, and what each means

1. AI recommends you

You'll usually see why in the answer itself: "praised for fast communication", "highly rated for complex cases." That language is synthesized from your reviews and coverage. Protect the sources feeding it — keep reviews flowing, keep data consistent — and start tracking, because AI answers churn as models update and competitors move.

2. AI doesn't mention you at all

The most common result, even for good businesses. It has six diagnosable causes — retrieval gaps, conflicting data, slogan-heavy websites, thin third-party evidence, stronger competitors, or plain sampling noise — and we wrote the full diagnosis guide for exactly this outcome.

3. AI mentions you, but gets facts wrong

Treat this as urgent. Wrong services, wrong address, "may be closed", attributing a competitor's weakness to you — these errors repeat at scale, and a customer who hears "they don't do emergency work" from a confident assistant doesn't call to double-check. Trace each error to its source (usually a stale profile or conflicting listing), fix the source, then re-check until the correction propagates.

4. AI describes you accurately but recommends competitors

The competitive gap. Read the justifications AI gives for the businesses it does recommend — more reviews, specific specialties, better-documented presence — and the cited sources behind them. That's a to-do list written by the same system deciding who gets the customer.

How to help AI understand your business better

Whatever the check finds, improvement follows the same lines — this is answer engine optimization in practice:

• Say what you do in plain, extractable language. Every service page should answer what, where, for whom, and at what cost in its first 60 words. AI reads your website content literally; make the literal reading correct.
• Make your business data agree everywhere. Website, Google Business Profile, directories: identical name, services, hours, phone. AI systems cross-reference; conflicts get you skipped or misdescribed.
• Give AI reviews worth quoting. AI uses reviews as evidence and paraphrases their themes. Recent, specific reviews on Google plus one industry platform outweigh a big pile of stale ones.
• Be present where AI looks. Your scan's cited sources are the map: complete those directory profiles, earn the local mention, participate where your customers already discuss businesses like yours.
• Add structured data and an llms.txt file. Schema markup makes your facts machine-readable; a curated llms.txt gives AI crawlers your best summary. Both are cheap; neither substitutes for the four items above.

Then re-check on a schedule

One check is a snapshot. Models update, competitors move, answers drift — which is why we built weekly tracking with a statistical baseline into Radar ($49/mo), including alerts when something material changes and Facts Watch for new errors. Whether you use our tooling or a calendar reminder and a spreadsheet: measure monthly at minimum, and judge trends rather than single answers.

Frequently asked questions

How do I ask AI what it knows about my business?

Ask directly in a fresh chat: "What do you know about [business name] in [city]? What services do they offer, and what's their reputation?" Then verify every claim. Follow with the buying questions your customers actually ask, because being described accurately and being recommended are different results.

What does AI know about my business?

Whatever the public web says: your website content, Google Business Profile, reviews and their themes, directory listings, news mentions, and community discussion — synthesized into a confident summary. AI has no inside knowledge of your business; it has a compression of your public footprint, errors included.

Can I change what AI says about my business?

Yes — by changing the sources it reads. Fix conflicting data, publish clear answer-first website content, build recent reviews, complete cited directories. Because assistants ground local answers in live retrieval, source fixes commonly show up in answers within weeks. You cannot edit AI's answers directly or pay for placement.

Which AI platforms should I check?

ChatGPT (largest usage), Gemini (Google's data ecosystem), Perplexity (aggressive source citing), and Google AI Overviews (highest search volume). They draw on measurably different source mixes — we routinely see a business strong on one platform and absent on another, which is exactly why single-platform checks mislead.

Is there a free tool that checks what AI says about my business?

Yes — our free scan observes real ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answers about your business and reports them with receipts: every question, every answer, every competitor, every cited source. Three free scans per IP per day, no signup to see results.