What do AI assistants say about your business? Here's how to find out
Superseded, 26 September 2026. Read the replacement, AI visibility, and the email you can lawfully send. It keeps the full record behind this piece.
What do AI assistants say about your business? Here's how to find out
Buying decisions increasingly open with a question typed into an AI assistant. "Best accountant in Sligo." "Is this shop reliable." "Who does private AI installs in Ireland."
The model builds its answer from what it has read: your website, directories, reviews, forums. Where none of that describes you accurately, the assistant describes you anyway. Or it describes your competitor.
Check it yourself, in ten minutes
Open ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, and put the same plain-language question to each.
- "What is [your company name]? What do they sell, where are they based, and what do they charge?"
- "Who are the best [your service] providers in [your town/county]?"
- "Is [your company] trustworthy? What do people say about them?"
Write down what comes back. Four things matter: whether you appear at all, whether the facts are right, whether the prices are current, and whether the answer claims something you cannot support.
What you will usually find
- The assistant knows nothing. No page on your site says, in plain text, what you do, where, for whom, and at what price. Models cannot quote what you never wrote.
- It is confidently wrong. An old address. A service you dropped. A competitor's prices, attributed to you.
- It quotes a directory, not you. Where a third-party listing with stale details is the only public record of your business, that listing becomes the truth.
- It cannot tell what is machine-written on your own site. AI-written copy is often why a business reads as generic in an answer.
The fixes that are not magic
No trick gets you into every AI answer, and anyone promising "number one in ChatGPT" is selling something they cannot deliver. What helps:
- State the facts plainly on your own site. What you do, where, for whom, what it costs, how long it takes. In text, not images or JavaScript.
- Give answer engines something to quote. A short, factual summary page does more than a thousand adjectives.
- Keep third-party listings accurate. Directories, review platforms and maps get read as readily as your site.
- Publish real content with a point of view. An explanation of your trade, written by someone who does the work, gets quoted far more than a product page.
- Check whether your copy reads as machine-written. If it does, buyers discount it. The tools do too.
Start with the honest version
The AI Reputation Report does what this article describes. It asks the assistants, records what they say, and hands you a ranked list of what to fix first. Where your own site copy is the weak point, the AI-Tell Audit grades how machine-written it reads. And for an Irish business, The Ireland Test shows how badly the models handle local detail. Free.