You don’t need a fancy tool to find out whether AI already knows your business exists. You just need five minutes, one browser tab, and the willingness to run five specific prompts. Here’s exactly what to type — and how to read what comes back.
Open ChatGPT (or Claude, or Perplexity, or a Google search that triggers an AI Overview). Type each of these, one at a time. Substitute your details where noted.
The five prompts
What you learn: Whether the AI has any record of you at all. If it responds with 'I don’t have information about that,' the AI genuinely doesn’t know you exist. That's an emergency.
What you learn: Whether AI puts you in the answer when a prospect asks the exact question they'd ask on Google. If your competitors show up and you don’t, the AI has categorized them but not you.
What you learn: Whether the AI has enough information about you to compare intelligently. A vague response ('I don’t have specific information about them') means your website isn’t giving the AI facts to work with.
What you learn: Whether AI knows what you actually do, not just that you exist. This is the closest to a buyer’s real question and the most important of the five.
What you learn: Whether the AI can link back to you. If it hallucinates a URL or admits it doesn’t know, no AI answer is ever going to send prospects to your site.
How to read what comes back
Every answer falls into one of three buckets. What bucket you land in determines what you should do next.
Invisible
The AI has no idea you exist. It either refuses to answer, hallucinates a made-up description, or lists only competitors. This is the most common outcome for local SMBs. The fix isn’t ‘more SEO’ — it’s making sure your website tells AI engines specifically what you do, for whom, and where.
Mentioned, not cited
The AI knows you exist and includes you in the answer — but doesn’t link back to your website. Prospects have to Google you separately to reach you. This is progress, but it isn’t the finish line. The fix is making your homepage and service pages structured in ways AI can lift directly, so it points at your site as the source, not at a directory.
Cited
The AI names your website as the source. Prospects can click through. This is the outcome you actually want — and it’s what an AI-visibility program is designed to move you toward. If you’re here for some engines but not others, that’s a per-engine tuning problem worth digging into.
What NOT to do with these results
A few traps to avoid before you rush to conclusions:
- Don’t test only ChatGPT. ChatGPT search is the most stingy about citations of any major AI engine. If you’re only checking one, check Perplexity or Google AI Overviews too — they’ll give you a truer read on whether your website content is doing its job.
- Don’t test the same prompt twice. AI answers vary slightly on repeat runs. One test isn’t a baseline; five tests across different phrasings is closer to reality.
- Don’t panic if you’re invisible. Being invisible to AI is the default state for most SMBs right now. The businesses winning AI visibility in 2026 are the ones fixing it deliberately, not the ones who were lucky.
What comes next
The five-minute test tells you where you stand. It doesn’t tell you what to fix. That’s the gap our audit closes: instead of running five prompts once, we run 30 across six AI engines, score your visibility per engine, check your actual website for the twelve technical and content signals AI engines look for, and hand you a prioritized fix list.
Ready to see what the numbers actually look like for your site? Use the audit panel to the right to kick off a run — takes about two minutes.