Searching your company name in ChatGPT and seeing it appear is reassuring, but it does not tell you much about your AI Search Visibility.
The more useful question is whether your business appears when somebody doesn’t already know you exist.
Who gets recommended when a potential customer asks for your service? Which competitors keep appearing? How are those businesses described? What sources seem to support the answers?
You do not need specialist software to start answering those questions.
In around 30 minutes, you can use AI search tools already available to most people to build a useful first baseline for your own business.
This is not a complete AI Search Visibility audit, and it will not give you enough data to build an entire strategy. What it can do is show you where to look next, and you may learn quite a lot about your competitors along the way.
If you have not tried a basic non-branded search before, our earlier article on how AI search is exposing unclear business websites is a useful starting point.
Start with five searches that actually matter to your business
Do not begin with your company name.
Instead, think about what a potential customer might type when they are looking for a business like yours but have not decided who to use.
Choose five searches covering slightly different reasons somebody might find you.
You can use these as templates and replace the brackets with your own services, locations and customers:
- “Best [service] companies in [location]”
- “Who can help with [specific customer problem]?”
- “[Service] companies for [type of customer or industry]”
- “Recommended [service] provider in [location]”
- “Who offers [important specialist service] near [location]?”
The searches should reflect work you genuinely want.
If one part of your business is particularly valuable, include it. If location matters, include your real service area. If you specialise in a particular industry, test whether AI search understands that too.
Five good searches are more useful than twenty random ones.
Write them down before you start so you test the same questions consistently.
This kind of search-intent thinking also sits behind good SEO: understanding what people are actually looking for before deciding which pages, content and searches matter.
Test the same searches across more than one AI tool
Now run your five searches through two or three AI search experiences you already have access to.
That could include ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI search experiences.
Use a fresh conversation where possible. You want the answer to respond to the search itself rather than information you have already given the tool earlier in a long chat.
For every search, record five things:
- Your business: Were you mentioned at all?
- Competitors: Which businesses were recommended instead or alongside you?
- Description: What was said about your business and the competitors?
- Sources: Which websites, directories or other references appear to support the answer?
- Accuracy: Is anything missing, misleading or out of date?
You do not need a complicated spreadsheet. A simple document or notes app is enough.
The aim is to stop judging AI visibility from one screenshot and start looking for patterns.
One answer can change. A competitor appearing repeatedly across different questions and platforms is much more interesting.
Pay particular attention to the competitors that keep appearing
This is where the exercise becomes much more useful.
If the same two or three competitors repeatedly appear while your business does not, write their names down.
Then investigate them.
Start with their websites.
Do they have a dedicated page for the service you searched for? Is the location clearly explained? Do they have case studies proving experience in that area? Are there useful questions and answers? Do they make their specialist sectors clearer than you do?
Then look beyond their website.
Are they listed by relevant trade organisations or Chambers? Do they have strong reviews? Have local or industry publications mentioned them? Are they present on respected directories? Do any of those websites also appear among the sources being referenced by the AI tool?
You are not trying to copy their website.
You are trying to understand what information and evidence exists about that competitor that may not exist about you.
That can uncover very practical differences.
Perhaps a competitor has three case studies covering a sector you only mention once.
Perhaps their website has a dedicated page for a valuable service while yours bundles it into a general page.
Perhaps several credible external websites describe them as a specialist in something you want to be known for too.
Those are much more useful findings than simply knowing that “Competitor A appeared and we didn’t”.
Check whether AI understands what you want to be known for
Visibility is only useful when the representation is right.
Now try a different type of question:
“What is [your business name] known for?”
You could also ask:
“What services does [your business name] specialise in?”
Compare the answer with how you actually position the business.
Does it recognise your most important services? Does it understand your location? Does it describe the type of customers you work with? Is an old service being given too much importance? Is something commercially important missing completely?
Repeat the same exercise for one or two of the competitors you identified earlier.
This can reveal another useful difference.
A competitor may not simply be appearing more frequently. AI systems may also have a much clearer picture of what that business represents.
If your business wants more commercial work but is consistently described around domestic services, for example, that is worth investigating even if you are technically being mentioned.
Give yourself a simple baseline
You should now have enough information to make a rough assessment in four areas.
Discovery
Do you appear when people search for the service without using your company name?
Strong / Mixed / Weak
Relevance
Are you appearing for the services, locations and customer types you actually want?
Strong / Mixed / Weak
Representation
When AI tools describe the business, is the information accurate and aligned with how you want to be understood?
Strong / Mixed / Weak
Competitive strength
Are the same competitors consistently appearing instead, and can you identify some of the reasons they may have stronger signals?
Strong / Mixed / Weak
Do not worry about turning this into a percentage.
There is no meaningful reason to declare yourself “72% visible” from ten manual searches.
The value is in creating a baseline you can come back to later.
Finish with three things you can actually improve
Before closing ChatGPT and forgetting everything you just found, write down the three clearest gaps.
They should be specific enough to act on.
For example:
- We do not have a proper page for one of the services we most want to sell.
- Our strongest competitor has several relevant case studies and we have none.
- AI tools consistently misunderstand the area we cover.
- We barely appear outside branded searches.
- The same external sources repeatedly support our competitors but barely mention us.
Some improvements may be relatively straightforward. You might strengthen a service page, update outdated information or publish a case study that should already exist.
Others point towards something broader.
If competitors have stronger third-party authority, clearer positioning, better content coverage and greater visibility across a whole group of searches, one website edit is unlikely to solve it.
That is where the exercise starts becoming a strategy question.
What this 30-minute check cannot tell you
The basic tools are accessible to almost everyone, which makes this a useful exercise for getting an initial view of how AI search currently sees your market.
The limitation is scale.
Five searches across a few platforms can reveal patterns, but they cannot show everything influencing your visibility.
A deeper AI Search Visibility review can look across a much larger set of relevant customer questions, compare competitor visibility more systematically, investigate the sources and citations influencing answers and assess how clearly the business is understood across the web.
It can also show where AI visibility overlaps with wider SEO opportunities.
That might lead to changes on the website. It might mean stronger service or sector pages, new content, case studies, clearer business information or work to improve external authority.
Often, several of those areas need to support one another.
The 30-minute check gives you somewhere useful to start because you can see some of the evidence for yourself.
The deeper work is deciding which gaps matter most and what is realistically going to improve them.
Want to see the bigger picture?
Run the exercise above first.
You should finish with a better idea of which competitors are being surfaced, how AI search currently understands your business and where some of the obvious gaps may sit.
For a wider starting point, you can also run your website through EDP’s AI Search Visibility audit tool.
If you want to go further, our AI Search Visibility work looks beyond a handful of manual searches to build a deeper view of the questions that matter, competitor visibility, cited sources, website clarity, external authority and the SEO work that supports it.
Frequently asked questions
Start with several realistic non-branded searches that potential customers might use, run them across more than one AI tool and record whether your business appears, which competitors are recommended and how each business is described.
Want a hand with this?
We help businesses across Eastbourne and East Sussex turn this kind of thinking into real results.
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