AI Visibility Checker: See If Your Business Shows Up in AI Answers (Free Skill)

More customers now open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI and ask a plain question:

"Who should I call for a plumber in Austin?"

If the assistant names three companies and yours is not one of them, you did not lose on price or service. You lost before the phone ever rang, because the AI did not consider you at all.

This guide explains how AI assistants actually pick which local businesses to recommend, how to check where you stand in a few minutes, and how to fix the gaps. It comes with a free, open-source tool you can run yourself: the AI Presence Auditor, a Claude skill that does the whole check for you.

Why AI visibility is different from a Google ranking

For twenty years, "getting found" meant ranking on a page of ten blue links. You could sit at position seven and still catch clicks. AI answers do not work that way.

When someone asks an assistant for a local recommendation, it names a small handful of businesses, usually three to five, and stops. Everyone else in that city is invisible for that question. This is winner-take-few. You are either in the answer or you do not exist.

Two more things surprise most owners:

• The AI does not simply echo Google. A meaningful share of the businesses an assistant recommends are not the ones ranking first on Google. Ranking well still helps, but it is not a guarantee you will be named.
• Being cited is not the same as being recommended. An assistant can mention your page as a source while recommending a competitor in the same answer.

None of this means Google stops mattering. It means "get found" now has more than one front door, and most businesses only have one of them covered.

How AI picks local businesses (the part the fixes follow from)

There is no single "AI" to optimize for. Different assistants read from different places, so getting found by AI is a multi-surface job, not one listing.

Read that table again, because it is the whole strategy in one place. If a customer asks ChatGPT, your Bing presence, your website, and your reviews decide whether you show up. If they ask Google's AI, your Google Business Profile decides. The business that wins both has claimed and cleaned up all of it. Most owners have a solid Google Business Profile and nothing else, which is exactly the gap.

A few ground rules shape every recommendation an assistant makes:

• Reviews act as a trust filter. A rating around four stars and up, with recent and answered reviews, is roughly table stakes. Thin or below-average profiles get left out regardless of everything else. There is no proven exact cutoff, so do not chase a magic number.
• Consistency beats any single listing. A matching name, address, and phone across Google, Bing, Apple, Foursquare, and Yelp is what lets the assistant trust that you are one real, findable business.
• Clarity wins. A page that says "24/7 emergency plumbing in South Austin" in plain text gets recommended. A page that says "quality solutions for all your needs" is effectively invisible to an assistant trying to match a specific request.

An honest reality check

AI-sourced recommendations are still a small share of local demand today compared with the Google local pack, maps, and the phone. This is a growing edge worth getting ahead of, not the whole game. Any tool or agency that tells you AI search is the only thing that matters now is overselling it. Cover the AI surfaces because they are cheap to fix and few competitors have, not because your phone stopped ringing.

The free tool: AI Presence Auditor

We packaged the full check into a free, open-source Claude skill. A skill is a set of instructions Claude loads on demand. You give it a business and it runs the audit for you.

You give it:

• Business name
• Primary service
• City or service area
• Website
• Two or three competitors

It runs representative buyer prompts across the assistants, checks your presence on every surface AI reads, and returns a prioritized list of fixes, plus the competitor AI names in your place and the most likely reason why.

Install it in a minute:

git clone https://github.com/OptimizerTeam/agent-skillsmkdir -p ~/.claude/skillscp -r agent-skills/skills/ai-presence-auditor ~/.claude/skills/

Then ask Claude to "run the ai-presence-auditor skill for {business} in {city}." It is MIT licensed, so you are free to read it, use it, and adapt it.

How to run the check yourself

If you would rather do it by hand, here is the same audit, step by step.

1. Ask the assistants what your customers ask

Open ChatGPT and Perplexity, and Google's AI if you have it, and type the questions a real customer would:

• "best emergency plumber in {your city}"
• "who should I call for {common problem} in {your city}"
• "top-rated {your service} near {neighborhood}"

For each one, note whether you are named, which competitors are named, and what reason or source the assistant gives. Run each prompt a couple of times, since answers vary.

2. Check the surfaces AI reads

Look up your business on each of these and note whether the listing exists, is claimed, and is complete:

• Google Business Profile
• Bing Places
• Apple Business Connect
• Foursquare
• Yelp

Missing or unclaimed listings are the most common and most fixable gap, especially Bing, Apple, and Foursquare, which most local owners have never touched.

3. Check your consistency, reviews, and website

• NAP consistency: does your name, address, and phone match exactly across those listings and your site? Mismatches confuse the entity.
• Reviews: volume, recency, average rating, and whether you respond.
• Website clarity: does it state what you do and where in plain text, with service and service-area pages and an FAQ that answers real questions?

4. Check third-party mentions

Search for local "best plumbers in {city}" style round-ups, directories, and review sites. Are you on them? Those are the pages assistants pull from when they build an answer.

The fixes, in priority order

Sort your gaps by impact and effort and start with the quick wins:

1. Claim the missing listings (Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Foursquare, Yelp). Cheap, fast, and usually the biggest gap.
2. Fix any NAP mismatch so every source agrees on who and where you are.
3. Start a review habit (aim for one a week, and respond to them) rather than a one-time push.
4. Rewrite vague pages to name the exact service and city, and add a short FAQ that mirrors how people ask.
5. Earn a few local mentions on the round-ups and directories AI reads.

For a deeper walk-through of the surfaces, see AI Discovery Surfaces: AEO and GEO for Local Visibility and ChatGPT Local Results. For the Google side specifically, see Google Business Profile Optimization.

When to automate it

Running this once is useful. The hard part is doing it every week: catching a new competitor who got named, a review average that slipped, a listing that fell out of sync. That is the job Optimizer does automatically, checking every place customers look, confirming the facts with you, handing over the approved fixes, then recapping what moved. The skill is the manual version of the same idea, and a good way to see the gaps for yourself before anything is automated.

Whether you use the free skill, do it by hand, or automate it, the goal is the same: be the clear, trusted, easy-to-verify answer for your service and your city, so that when a customer asks an assistant who to call, your name is one of the few it says.