Before investing anything in AI visibility, run this test. It takes five minutes, requires no tools, and shows you exactly where you stand.

Step 1 — Ask the assistants what people actually ask

Open ChatGPT (with web search enabled), Perplexity and Gemini, and ask each of them two questions:

1. The buying question: "best [your service] in [your city]" — phrased the way a customer would.
2. The brand question: "What do you know about [your business name]?"

Record three things for each answer: are you mentioned, are you cited (linked as a source), and is the information correct?

Step 2 — Check whether AI crawlers can even reach you

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for lines blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. A surprising number of sites block AI crawlers by accident — often a leftover from a plugin or an overzealous security setting. If a crawler is blocked, that system can't read your site, period.

Step 3 — Check your structured data

Run your homepage through validator.schema.org. If it finds no structured data at all, AI systems have to guess who you are, what you sell and where you operate — and they guess conservatively: they leave you out.

How to read your results

• Mentioned, cited, correct — you're in good shape; your job is monitoring and defending the position.
• Mentioned but wrong — dangerous: AI is actively spreading outdated prices, addresses or services. Fix your sources.
• Not mentioned at all — the assistant is recommending your competitors to your customers. Every query is a lost referral, invisible in your analytics.

If you landed in the second or third group, that's fixable — see the five most common reasons AI skips a business, or read the basics in our post on llms.txt.