AI search visibility is how often assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews name your business when customers ask for what you sell. A small business plan: track 10 to 20 customer questions, record a baseline, fix the facts and sites assistants read, then measure answers, assistant visits and enquiries every month.
Run a local business? AI Local Fix sets up your listings, Google profile and markup, then counts the answers that name you.
- AI search visibility is how often assistants name your business when a customer asks for what you sell, and whether what they say is right.
- Track 10 to 20 customer questions in the language your customers use, with the same settings every month.
- Assistants disagree: with web search on, ChatGPT and Claude named no business in common on 19 of 24 Amsterdam pages and 15 of 25 Copenhagen pages.
- Measure three things monthly: how often you are named, visits from assistants, and enquiries that mention them. Pool months before you call a change.
What AI search visibility means for a small business
AI search visibility is how often AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews name your business when a customer asks for what you sell, and whether what they say about you is right. For a small business the plan has four steps: choose 10 to 20 questions your customers ask, record a baseline, fix the facts and the sites assistants read, and then measure three numbers every month: how often you are named, visits from assistants, and enquiries that mention them. With free tools it takes a few hours a month.
The plan at a glance:
| Step | What you do | When |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Questions | Write 10 to 20 questions customers ask before they know your name | Once, reviewed every quarter |
| 2. Baseline | Ask them in each assistant and save every answer | First week |
| 3. Fixes | Correct facts, add the missing pages, get listed and reviewed where assistants read | One or two fixes a month |
| 4. Measurement | Rerun the questions, read assistant visits and count enquiries | Every month |
This article is the plan. The formulas behind each number, with an interval table, are in the AI visibility metrics guide.
Where AI visibility fits in your marketing
AI visibility sits on top of the marketing you already do. Assistants build their answers from the same places customers look: your website, your Google Business Profile, review sites, directories and local press. Google says the usual SEO practices apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, including keeping your Business Profile and Merchant Center information up to date, and that no special AI files or markup are needed.
What changes is that each assistant gives its own short list. In AIGROW's October 2026 study, ChatGPT and Claude, both searching the web and asked once in the local language, named no business in common on 304 of 472 local pages (64.4%). In Amsterdam that happened on 19 of 24 pages, in Copenhagen on 15 of 25.
Trades differed most: plumbers on 16 of 19 pages, restaurants on 1 of 20. Being named by one assistant tells you little about the others, so check each one.
Review and listing sites carry real weight in those answers. Across ChatGPT and Claude answers with web search about cleaning services, Trustpilot was read in 49% and cited as the source of a business in 27%. For plumbers it was read in 22%.
Your reviews and listings are part of your AI visibility, whether you manage them or not.
| Channel you already run | What assistants take from it |
|---|---|
| Website | Services, prices, areas served, answers to common questions |
| Google Business Profile | Hours, address, category, reviews, used by Google's AI features |
| Review sites | Ratings and what customers say about you |
| Directories and trade associations | Proof you exist and what you do, in the source lists of many answers |
| Local press and blogs | Mentions that name you beside competitors |
Step 1: choose the questions your customers ask
Write 10 to 20 questions in your customers' words and language. A clinic in Copenhagen writes them in Danish; a bakery in Utrecht in Dutch. Mix three kinds:
- Finding: "Which physiotherapist in Copenhagen is good for back pain?"
- Comparing: "Is a sports physio or a chiropractor better for a running injury?"
- Urgent: "Who can see me this week for a stiff neck near Østerbro?"
Leave your business name out of them. A question that names you is easy to win and tells you nothing about new customers; keep up to five of those in a separate group to check what assistants say about you.
How many names you compete with depends on the market. In the October 2026 AIGROW Index, asked in each country's language, a page in Denmark averaged 27 different businesses across its answers, in the Netherlands 31 and in the United States 35. Asked again, Danish pages repeated 62% of their names and Dutch pages 54%.
Questions are worth asking more than once.
Step 2: record a baseline
Before you change anything, save what assistants say today. Three ways, from cheapest:
- By hand. Ask each question in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, signed out, and paste every answer into a sheet with the date. Note whether you were named, in what place, who was named instead, and what was said about you.
- The free checker. The AI visibility checker asks two buyer questions about your trade and city to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok and prints every answer word for word, in about 30 seconds.
- The free scan. The free AI scan reads your homepage, puts five questions to the models behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, and shows how often each names you, with a 95% interval on each rate.
Both free tools ask without web search, so treat them as a first reading, and keep your own answers from the apps beside them.
Write the settings down: which assistants, signed in or out, web search on or off, and from where you asked. ChatGPT uses an approximate location from your IP address when it searches, so asking from your shop and from home abroad can give different lists. Change a setting later and your months stop being comparable.
Step 3: fix what assistants read
Read the baseline answers and list what is wrong or missing, then work through it one or two items a month, biggest first:
- Wrong facts. Old opening hours, a closed branch, a service you stopped. Correct them on your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places and every listing you control, so they all say the same.
- Missing pages. If customers ask about a service or an area and your site has no page that answers it, write one: what you do, for whom, where, at what price or price range, and how to book.
- Missing listings and reviews. Look up the sites assistants read for your trade on the AI sources pages, check you are listed on the ones that fit, and ask recent happy customers for an honest review.
- Missing mentions. Local press, trade associations and suppliers' partner pages that name you beside competitors.
The owner's guide to getting cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity goes through each fix, and the AI search optimization guide covers crawler access if assistants cannot read your site.
Changes take time to show. Google says recrawling a page can take from several days to several months, and OpenAI says its search crawler adjusts to a robots.txt change in about 24 hours. Nobody can promise when, or whether, an assistant will start naming you.
Step 4: measure every month
Your measurement plan fits on one page:
| What you measure | Where it comes from | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| How often assistants name you | The same questions, same settings, every month | Whether you are in the answer at all |
| What they say about you | The full saved answers | Wrong facts to correct next |
| Which sites they cite | Answers with web search on | Where to get listed or reviewed |
| Visits from assistants | Referrals in your analytics, such as chatgpt.com | Clicks from people who read an answer |
| Enquiries that mention AI | A "how did you hear about us" question on forms and calls | The business result |
| Google AI features | Search Console Performance report, Web search type | Clicks and impressions, with AI Overviews and AI Mode counted in the Web totals |
The first number is the AI Recommendation Rate: answers that name you divided by every answer, with answers that name nobody kept in.
Referral visits show only part of the picture: they count the people who clicked a link in an answer. Many people who read an answer search your name or call you instead of clicking, which is why the enquiry question matters.
Worked example (invented numbers). A physiotherapy clinic in Copenhagen tracks 15 questions in Danish on four assistants, asked once a month: 60 answers. Month 1: named in 6 (10%, 95% interval 5% to 20%). It fixes its Google Business Profile hours, adds a page per treatment and gets listed on two health directories.
Month 3: 12 of 60 (20%, interval 12% to 32%). The intervals overlap, so one month proves nothing. It keeps measuring: months 1 to 3 together give 24 of 180 (13%, 9% to 19%), months 4 to 6 give 48 of 180 (27%, 21% to 34%).
Those ranges no longer overlap, so the rise is unlikely to be chance. In the same months, analytics shows a handful of visits a month from chatgpt.com, and the form question records three enquiries that found the clinic through an assistant.
The monthly routine and the time it takes
Estimates for a small business doing it in house:
| Task | When | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Rerun the questions and save the answers | First week | 1 to 2 hours by hand, less with a tool |
| Make one or two fixes from the list | Second and third week | 1 to 3 hours |
| Ask recent customers for reviews | Every week | 15 minutes |
| Update the sheet: rate per assistant, visits, enquiries | End of month | 30 minutes |
| Review the question list | Every quarter | 30 minutes |
Keep the report to one page: the rate per assistant with last month's beside it, the fixes made, assistant visits and enquiries. If you pay for a tracker, the guide to evaluating AI visibility tools shows what to check before you buy, including how many answers sit behind each figure.
Who can help, and what to ask them
You can run this plan yourself with the free tools above. If you would rather hand part of it over, there are three common setups:
- A one-off audit to set the baseline and the fix list. AIGROW's AI visibility audit asks 20 to 40 of your buyer questions across four assistants, records every answer and the competitors named in your place, and ends with an ordered list of fixes.
- A monthly service that does the work and measures the answers. AIGROW's Complete AI Visibility service covers your Google Business Profile, directory citations, structured data, and pages and answers for your customers' questions, with three competitors compared and a monthly report.
- Your marketing agency, if it already runs your website or ads. Agencies can add AI visibility reporting to their work; AIGROW's agency plan gives them white-label monthly reports.
Whoever you choose, ask: which assistants and languages will you check, how many times is each question asked, will I see every full answer, what will you fix first, and how will you count enquiries. Walk away from anyone who guarantees a place in ChatGPT's answers. The AEO strategy guide has a longer list of questions for choosing a provider.
Sources
Official pages read on 20 October 2026:
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website
- OpenAI Help Center: Searching the web with ChatGPT
- OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
AIGROW data:
- AI recommendations study, 2026
- AI Visibility Report, October 2026 edition
- Sites AI assistants read for cleaning services and for plumbers
- AI Recommendation Rate definition
The worked example uses invented numbers. Every interval in it is a 95% Wilson interval.
Rather have this done for you?
AI Local Fix does the groundwork once: your Google Business Profile, up to 15 listings, the markup on your pages and a reviews kit. It counts how often four assistants name you on 10 questions for your city before the work, at day 30 and at day 90.
If the day 90 count names you no more often than the first, you get the full price back. Ask within 14 days of the day 90 report. No ranking and no specific AI answer is promised.
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