Is Your Business Visible in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini? Here's How to Check (and Fix It)

Why does AI search visibility even matter for a small business?

Because a growing share of your customers aren't Googling you anymore. They're asking ChatGPT "who does commercial cleaning in western Sydney?" or Claude "what's a good accountant for a small construction business in Parramatta?" — and acting on the answer. If your business isn't in the set of names those tools return, you're invisible to that customer, full stop. There's no ranking page two anymore. There's a list of three or four businesses, and then there's nothing.

This is what the industry is calling answer engine optimisation (AEO) — sometimes generative engine optimisation (GEO) — and for SMBs it's the single most underpriced marketing opportunity right now. Most of your competitors aren't even checking. You can get ahead in an afternoon.

How do I actually check if AI search engines know about my business?

This is the part everyone skips and it's the most important 30 minutes you'll spend on marketing this quarter. Do it manually. Do not pay for a tool to do it.

Open four tabs: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google (so you can see AI Overviews). Then run three types of prompts in each:

1. Category prompts (how customers actually search)

Ask the question a cold prospect would ask. Not your brand name. Not your SEO keywords. The actual plain-English question. For example:

• "Who are the best digital marketing agencies in Sydney for small businesses?"
• "What are good Microsoft training providers in Melbourne?"
• "Recommend a reliable plumber in Liverpool, NSW."

Write down: Does your business appear? In what position? Who's listed ahead of you? What sources does the AI cite (if it shows citations)?

2. Comparison prompts

Customers often arrive at the shortlist stage and ask the AI to compare. Try:

• "[Your business] vs [top competitor] — which is better for [use case]?"
• "Alternatives to [big-name competitor in your space]"

If the AI doesn't know you exist, you won't appear here either. If it does know you, check whether the description is accurate. The most common problem isn't invisibility — it's being described wrongly.

3. Fact-check prompts

Ask the AI to describe your business directly:

• "Tell me about [your business name]."
• "What services does [your business] offer?"
• "Where is [your business] located and what are their hours?"

You'll be surprised (and sometimes horrified) by what comes back. Wrong hours. Wrong services. Confused with a similarly-named business in another country. Five-year-old information. This is extremely common.

What should I look for in the results?

A simple scoring framework I use with Codeble clients:

Keep this as a simple spreadsheet. One row per prompt, one column per AI system, a note on outcome. You'll see the pattern within 20 minutes.

Why do some AI tools know about my business and others don't?

Because they're trained on different data and use different real-time search sources.

• ChatGPT uses a combination of its training data and Bing-powered search when it browses. Being visible in Bing matters more than most people realise.
• Claude browses the open web and leans heavily on what reputable sources say about you. If you're not mentioned on sites it trusts, you won't appear.
• Gemini is deeply connected to Google Search, Maps, and the Knowledge Graph. If your Google Business Profile is a mess, Gemini will reflect that.
• Google AI Overviews are a direct extension of Google Search — if you don't rank on page one for the underlying query, you probably won't be cited.

The practical takeaway: there isn't one magic fix. Each system draws from slightly different inputs, which is why the boring fundamentals (clean website, clean GBP, reputable third-party coverage) work for all of them at once.

What actually moves the needle on AI search visibility?

Three things, in order of ROI for a small business:

1. Get mentioned on the sources AI systems already cite

When an AI gives you a list of "best X in Y," it's almost always pulling from a handful of sources: industry directories, local press, review sites, category round-up articles, and a few well-ranked blog posts. Your job is to figure out which sources are being cited for your category and get your business onto them.

How: Run your category prompts, click through any citations the AI provides (ChatGPT and Gemini often show them; Claude will if you ask), and make a list. Then work through them — submit to the directory, pitch a local journo, get added to the round-up. This is the least sexy work in marketing and the highest-ROI work in AEO.

2. Tighten the factual pages on your own site

AI systems heavily rely on your own site for the "who, what, where" questions. If your About, Services, Locations, and Contact pages are vague, outdated, or missing, the AI has to guess — and guesses badly.

What to fix:

• An About page with clear, factual statements: what you do, who you serve, where you operate, when you started.
• Service pages that use plain language, not marketing speak. "We do SEO" beats "We craft bespoke digital journeys."
• Location pages with full NAP (Name, Address, Phone), hours, and service areas.
• Schema markup — Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQPage — on the relevant pages. This is one of the few technical fixes that actually matters for AEO.

If you've got an FAQ on each service page written in natural question-and-answer format, you're already ahead of 80% of your competitors. AI systems love clear Q&A content because it's what they're designed to surface.

3. Clean up your Google Business Profile and category directories

Gemini and AI Overviews pull heavily from this. If your GBP has the wrong category, wrong hours, or hasn't been updated in two years, fix it today. Then check the top 3–5 directories for your industry — some will be Australian-specific (Yellow Pages, TrueLocal, industry associations), some global (Yelp, Trustpilot). Clean, consistent info across all of them is boring and effective.

Should I pay for an "AEO tool" to do this?

Honestly? Not yet. I keep an eye on this category and the tools are immature. Most of them do three things:

1. Run the prompts you could run yourself (for $200/month).
2. Give you a "score" that doesn't mean much.
3. Suggest generic content fixes you could write yourself.

There are a couple of monitoring tools I think will become useful once they mature — tracking your visibility across AI systems over time is genuinely hard to do manually at scale — but right now, if you're an SMB, the right move is a quarterly manual audit. Spend the tool money on content or outreach instead.

The one exception: if you already pay for Ahrefs or Semrush, their AI search features are worth using because they're bundled. Don't subscribe purely for the AI search features though.

What are the biggest mistakes SMBs make with AI search?

After running these audits for a bunch of clients, the same patterns come up:

• Obsessing over brand-name prompts. "ChatGPT describes us correctly!" is nice, but nobody's asking about you by name. Category prompts are what matter.
• Ignoring Bing. Everyone forgets Bing exists. ChatGPT's browsing uses it heavily. A clean Bing Webmaster Tools setup is 20 minutes of work and actually matters.
• Spamming AI-generated content. Publishing 50 thin AI-written articles a month will hurt, not help. Google has gotten much better at spotting and devaluing template content, and AI systems increasingly lean on authoritative, not just abundant, sources.
• Writing for algorithms instead of humans. The content that performs best in AI search reads like a person explaining something clearly to another person. Pretty much the opposite of old-school SEO.
• Treating this as a one-off. AI systems update constantly. The audit you do today will be stale in six months. Block an hour every quarter.

The bottom line

AI search isn't replacing Google overnight, but it's taking a real and growing bite out of the discovery journey — especially for the kinds of "recommend me a..." queries that small businesses depend on. The good news: the work is boring, manual, and well within the capability of any SMB owner with an afternoon to spare. The bad news: almost nobody in your category is doing it yet, which is also the good news, because the window to get ahead is open right now.

If you'd rather not spend the afternoon — or you want someone to run the audit, fix the technical stuff, and build a proper AEO strategy into your marketing — get in touch. It's the work we spend most of our days on at Codeble, and it's currently one of the highest-leverage things an Australian SMB can do for growth.