Is your business showing up in ChatGPT and AI Overviews? How to check it yourself

You can check your AI visibility for free in about fifteen minutes. Run three kinds of prompt – a recommendation prompt, a brand prompt and a decision prompt – in a logged-out private window, write down what the AI says next to what is actually true, then read the result honestly. If your business is missing or wrong, the cause is almost always weak pages or an inconsistent profile across the web, not a missing “AI plugin”. There is no AI tool you can install that makes an answer engine cite you. You earn it with pages that say plainly what you do and where, and a business profile that agrees with itself everywhere it appears.

This is a method, not a product pitch. The “enter your domain” tools you will find from Ahrefs, Semrush and others can be useful, but you do not need any of them to get an honest first read. You need a browser and a notebook. Townsmith Local Pages Engine does its work entirely on your own server with no external calls, so the advice here matches how the plugin behaves: nothing phoning home, just checks you can run and verify yourself.

What does “showing up in AI search” actually mean?

AI search splits into two separate places, and they are measured differently. The first is Google’s own AI features – AI Overviews (the summary at the top of some results) and AI Mode (the conversational tab). The second is standalone assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, which people increasingly ask “who should I call for a boiler repair in Uckfield?” rather than typing it into a search box.

The practical difference matters for how you check. Google’s surfaces draw on the same index and quality signals as ordinary Search, so being indexed and snippet-eligible is the groundwork. The assistants build answers from a mix of their training data, live web retrieval and any connected search partner, so a business can be named in one and absent from another on the same day. Checking all three by hand is the only way to see the full picture without paying for a monitoring tool.

Why run the check in a logged-out private session?

Open a private or incognito window and stay signed out of Google, ChatGPT and any assistant before you run a single prompt. Logged-in sessions personalise answers using your location and your saved places, so a result that looks reassuring to you may be an artefact of the fact that you have visited your own website forty times this week. A clean session gives you something closer to what a stranger in your town would see.

• Use a private or incognito window and sign out of every account first.
• Name the town in the prompt rather than relying on detected location, so the test is repeatable.
• Run the same prompts on a different network or device if you can, to see how stable the answer is.
• Note the date. Answer engines change weekly, so a result is a snapshot, not a verdict.

What are the three prompt types to run?

Run three kinds of prompt, because each one tests something different. A recommendation prompt asks the engine to choose suppliers from scratch and tells you whether you are in the consideration set at all. A brand prompt asks about you by name and tells you whether the engine knows who you are and describes you correctly. A decision prompt mimics how a real customer narrows down a shortlist and tells you whether your specifics – service area, hours, specialisms – survive the comparison.

Recommendation prompts: are you in the shortlist?

These ask the engine to name suppliers without mentioning you. They reveal whether you appear unprompted, who the engine names instead, and how it justifies the choice.

• “Who are the best-rated boiler repair engineers in Lewes?”
• “Recommend a few reliable electricians covering Uckfield and the surrounding villages.”
• “I need an emergency plumber near Crowborough this weekend – who should I call?”

Brand prompts: does the engine know who you are?

These name your business directly. They test whether the engine has a clear entity for you and whether the facts it returns – what you do, where you work, how to reach you – match reality.

• “What does [your business name] do and which areas does it cover?”
• “Is [your business name] in Uckfield any good, and what do people say about them?”
• “What are [your business name]’s opening hours and phone number?”

Decision prompts: do your specifics survive a comparison?

These mimic a real shortlisting moment. They test whether the engine can attach the right details to you when a customer is choosing between two or three options.

• “I want a Gas Safe registered engineer in Lewes who does Saturday call-outs – who fits?”
• “Compare two boiler repair firms covering the Uckfield area on price, response time and reviews.”
• “Which local electricians take on rewires for period properties around Lewes?”

How do you record what the AI says versus reality?

Keep it simple and write it down as you go. For each prompt on each engine, record the answer it gave, whether you were named, whether the details were correct, and which sources it cited if any are shown. The gap between the AI’s claim and the truth is the whole point of the exercise – it tells you exactly what to fix.

• The engine and the date you ran it.
• The prompt, copied exactly.
• Were you named? Yes, no, or only when asked directly.
• What it got right and what it got wrong – wrong town, old phone number, a service you do not offer.
• Which pages or profiles it cited, where citations are shown.

Watch for confident invention. Assistants will sometimes state hours, prices or a service area that you never published. If an engine is inventing details about you, that is a sign it has no solid source to anchor to, which is itself a finding: the fix is to publish the real facts plainly so there is something authoritative to cite.

How do you read the result honestly?

Absence is information, not a catastrophe. In almost every case, being missing or misdescribed traces back to one of a few causes, and none of them is a missing AI feature. Here is how to interpret what you found.

• Named and accurate across all three: you are in good shape. Keep your pages and profile current and move on.
• Named only when you ask directly, never recommended: the engine knows you exist but does not rate you as a strong answer. Usually this means thin or generic pages that do not clearly state what you do and where.
• Wrong details: your information is inconsistent across the web. The same name, address and phone number must agree on your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories that list you.
• Completely absent everywhere: there is probably not enough crawlable, specific text about your business for any engine to draw on. Start with real pages and an accurate profile.
• Present in one engine, absent in another: normal. The assistants use different sources. Fix the fundamentals and coverage tends to broaden over time rather than all at once.

The honest reading is that there is no separate AI checklist beyond good, specific, people-first pages and a profile that is consistent everywhere. Google has said as much for its own surfaces: structured data is not required for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and there is no special schema you add to appear in them, although structured data still helps you qualify for rich results in ordinary Search (Google, “AI Features and Your Website”, developers.google.com, current as of August 2026). The same logic applies to the assistants. There is no llms.txt hack or chunking trick that substitutes for being genuinely useful and easy to read.

Can Search Console show your AI visibility instead?

Partly, and only for Google. On 3 June 2026 Google announced a Generative AI performance report in Search Console that shows impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, rolling out to a subset of sites with the UK first (Google Search Central Blog, “Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console”, 3 June 2026). It covers Google’s own AI features only and reports impressions rather than clicks. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini are not in it, so for those you are back to either the manual check on this page or a third-party citation-monitoring tool.

If the report has reached your property, use it alongside the manual prompts rather than instead of them. It tells you how often Google’s AI features surfaced your pages. It does not tell you what the assistants are saying about you, which is exactly what the recommendation, brand and decision prompts are for.

Why no paid black-box scorer?

The free-tool search results for this topic are crowded with “enter your domain and get an AI visibility score” products. Some are well made. The trouble with a single black-box number is that it tells you a result without showing you the prompts behind it, so you cannot tell whether a low score means you are genuinely absent or that the tool ran an oddly worded query in a logged-in session. The fifteen-minute manual method gives you the raw answers in front of you, which is far more useful when you are deciding what to actually change.

This is the same stance Townsmith takes inside the plugin. The free Local Pages Engine has no AI and makes no external calls. It builds real, editable location pages on your own server, scores each one from 0 to 100 on substance, holds back the thin ones before they publish, and outputs clean schema – all without sending your content anywhere. The Safety Check gives an advisory verdict on doorway-page risk across your set of pages, which is a judgement to inform you and not a guarantee from Google, and Twin Finder flags pages that are too similar to each other. You can read every result and act on it. Nothing is hidden behind a score.

What do you do if your business is missing?

Fix the fundamentals in order. The work that makes you visible in AI search is the same work that makes you visible in ordinary local search, because the engines draw on the same web. There is no shortcut that skips it.

• Publish a specific page for each thing you do and each area you serve, with real detail a stranger could act on – not the same paragraph with the town name swapped in. The guide to AI search for local businesses covers what those pages need to contain.
• Make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere, starting with your Google Business Profile. Picking the right primary and secondary categories matters too – see the Google Business Profile categories guide.
• Once pages are live, watch how they perform rather than guessing. The guide to measuring location pages covers what to track in Search Console, including the new Generative AI report where you have it.
• Build the pages and schema with a tool that keeps your content on your own server. Townsmith’s features show how the engine generates substantial, schema-backed pages and holds back the thin ones.

Then re-run the same three prompts in a few weeks. AI search moves on its own clock, so do not expect an overnight change, but a business with clear pages and a consistent profile gets named more often than one without. That is the whole mechanism, and you can verify it yourself the same way you ran this check.

Common questions

Is there a plugin that makes ChatGPT recommend my business?

No. No plugin can make an answer engine cite you, and any product that promises it should be treated with suspicion. The assistants build answers from the open web and their own training data. What you can do is publish clear, specific pages and keep your business profile consistent, which is what gives an engine something accurate to draw on. A tool can help you produce those pages well, but the visibility is earned, not installed.

How often should I check?

Once a quarter is enough for most local businesses, with an extra check after you make a real change such as publishing a batch of new pages or correcting your business profile. Because the engines change weekly, treat any single run as a snapshot. The trend across a few checks tells you more than one result on one day.

Does adding schema get me into AI Overviews?

Not on its own. Google has confirmed that structured data is not required for AI Overviews or AI Mode and there is no special AI schema to add (Google, “AI Features and Your Website”, developers.google.com, current as of August 2026). Schema still earns its place because it helps you qualify for rich results in ordinary Search and describes your business clearly, so it is worth doing well – it just is not the lever that flips on AI visibility. Clear, specific pages do that.

The AI gave wrong details about my business. What now?

Wrong details almost always mean inconsistent information across the web. Audit your name, address, phone number, hours and service area on your own site, your Google Business Profile and the directories that list you, and make them agree. Once the authoritative sources are correct and consistent, the engines tend to catch up on their next refresh. There is no button to file a correction directly with an assistant, so fixing the source is the route.

Written by Stephen Evans. Figures current as of 28 August 2026. Sources: Google Search Central Blog, “Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console” (3 June 2026); Google Search Central, “AI Features and Your Website” (developers.google.com).