What Does AI Say About Your Business? Run This 20-Minute Check

Here is a situation worth picturing. A customer asks an AI assistant about your business and gets told your old address, hours you changed two years ago, or a service you stopped offering. Your website is correct. Your Google Business Profile is correct. But something else out there is not, and the assistant repeated it with complete confidence.

That is a good reason to spend twenty minutes finding out what AI says about your business. You do not need any tools, any budget, or any technical skill. You just need to ask, read carefully, and write down what you find.

Why This Check Is Worth Twenty Minutes

More people are starting their search inside a chat window rather than a results page. They ask a full question, they get a paragraph back, and often they never click through to anyone's website at all. Whatever that paragraph says about you is, for that person, what your business is.

You cannot control that paragraph. But you can see it, and you can usually trace it back to a source you do control. I wrote a longer piece on how search is changing and what still works if you want the wider picture. This post is just the check itself.

The Check: Four Questions to Ask

Open two or three AI assistants. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity are the ones I use most. Ask each of them the same four questions. Keep a plain document open and paste the answers in as you go.

1. What does this business do?

Ask: "What does [your business name] in Bloomington, Indiana do?"

You are checking whether the description matches how you would describe yourself to a stranger at a Chamber lunch. Watch for services you stopped offering, services you never offered, and a general vagueness that could apply to any business in your industry.

2. Would you recommend us?

Ask: "Who would you recommend for [your main service] near Bloomington, Indiana?"

Do not use your business name here. This one tells you whether you come up at all when someone describes a need rather than a company. If competitors appear and you do not, that is useful information, not a verdict.

3. Are the basics right?

Ask: "What are [your business name]'s hours, location, and contact information?"

Address, phone, hours, service area. This is where stale information shows up most often, usually pulled from an old directory listing nobody has looked at in years.

4. What do people say about us?

Ask: "What do customers say about [your business name]?"

Reviews get summarized and repeated. If the summary leans on one unhappy review from four years ago, that tells you where to put your attention.

What to Do With What You Find

Sort your notes into three piles.

If the answer is wrong

Track down the source. Old directory listings, an abandoned social profile, a review site page you never claimed, a press mention with outdated details. Fix it where it lives. Then make sure your name, address, phone number, and hours match exactly across your website, your Google Business Profile, and every directory you can find. Consistency is what makes a machine confident it has the right answer.

If the answer is vague

Vagueness usually means your own website is vague. If your services page says "we provide quality solutions tailored to your needs," an AI tool has nothing specific to work with. Name the services. Name the service area. Name the kinds of customers you serve. Plain, specific language helps people and machines equally.

If you do not come up at all

This is common for smaller businesses and it is not a crisis. It usually means there is not much written about you anywhere except your own site. Case studies, project write-ups, community involvement that gets documented online, and reviews all give these systems something to find. So does making your key information easy to read, which is the idea behind llms.txt, an optional low-cost step some site owners are trying.

Where the Answers About Your Business Actually Come From

It helps to know that these tools are not making anything up out of thin air, and they are not reading some private index of businesses. They are assembling an answer from public sources: your website, your Google Business Profile, directory listings, review sites, news mentions, social profiles, and whatever else is indexed and readable.

That is genuinely good news for a small business. The inputs are the same things you have always been able to influence. Nothing here requires a new budget line.

What Not to Read Into It

A few honest caveats, because I would rather you not overreact to a single result.

• Answers vary between tools, and the same tool can answer differently on different days. One bad result is a data point, not a trend.
• These tools personalize. What you see may not be what a customer in Ellettsville sees.
• Being named by an AI assistant is not a ranking you can check or a number you can report. Do not let anyone sell you a guaranteed position in one.
• This check does not replace your analytics. It sits alongside them. If you want to understand what is actually happening on your site, Google Analytics, Search Console, and your Business Profile each do a different job.

A Simple Way to Keep Track

Put the date at the top of your notes and run the same four questions again in three months. Same wording, same tools. You are not looking for a score. You are looking for whether the wrong address is gone, whether the description got sharper, and whether you start showing up for the recommendation question.

Twice a year is plenty for most businesses. Quarterly if you have recently moved, rebranded, or changed what you offer.

If You Would Rather Not Do This Alone

I run this check for clients as part of ongoing work, and I am glad to walk through it with you once so you know what to look for afterward. No pitch, just an honest read on what is out there. You can schedule a conversation here.

Frequently Asked Questions