Is your business visible in AI answers? A checklist

This checklist tests whether assistants can reach your website, read your key facts in plain text, and find the same name, address and description across your listings. Its fourteen checks cover each of those. The last section shows how to see the answers for yourself.

How does this checklist work?

Each item is a yes-or-no statement. Answer it honestly; every “no” is a task.

Items carry a weight from 1 to 3. Weight 3 marks the foundations, and some failures there can keep you out of an assistant’s search answers. OpenAI’s crawler overview, for example, says: “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.”

Which checks matter most?

Access comes first. Google lists “ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure” in its AI features guide. Each assistant names its own search crawler: OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, and Bingbot for Bing.

Hosting settings can block crawlers that robots.txt allows. Cloudflare, for example, lets customers block AI bots by behavior: search crawlers, agents that fetch pages for a person in real time, and training crawlers.

Indexing comes next. Google says a page must be indexed to be a supporting link in AI Overviews. Microsoft says experiences like Copilot are “powered by Bing’s search index”.

Then come the facts themselves. A December 2024 analysis by Vercel and MERJ found that “none of the major AI crawlers currently render JavaScript.” Microsoft advises against hiding important answers in tabs or putting key information only in images.

If your phone number does not appear in View Source, a crawler that skips scripts will not see it either.

Then come listings and reputation. Google compiles business information from your website, licensed third-party data and user contributions. Its local ranking page says “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.”

Google’s review guidance prohibits offering incentives for reviews.

How can you check AI answers yourself?

1. Write down five to ten questions your customers ask, in their words. Include your town or neighborhood. OpenAI suggests including “your city, neighborhood, or postal code” when local results show the wrong area.
2. Ask while signed out, or in a private browser window. OpenAI says that if memory is enabled, ChatGPT “may use relevant saved memories when rewriting a search query.” It also says people who are not signed in can use web search.
3. Ask from inside your service area. ChatGPT may use an approximate location from your IP address, and OpenAI notes that a VPN may affect it.
4. Ask each assistant: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google Search with its AI Overview.
5. Record what you see: which businesses are named, in what order, and which sources are cited. Perplexity says each answer includes numbered citations. ChatGPT shows a Sources button when available.
6. Check what is said about you. OpenAI warns that search results and citations “can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect.” If a phone number or service area is wrong, correct it where it is listed.
7. Repeat monthly, with the same questions asked the same way, and keep the notes in one place.

Why do the answers change between runs?

Assistants do not return a fixed list. In a January 2026 study, SparkToro reported “a <1 in 100 chance” that ChatGPT or Google’s AI would give the same list of brands in any two responses. The author concluded that how often a brand appears across many runs is a more reasonable measure than its position.

Google also says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models, so “the set of responses and links they show will vary.” Ask each question more than once, and count how often you appear.

What do the official tools show?

Google’s generative AI performance reports in Search Console show how often your URLs appeared in AI features, and which pages. Bing’s AI Performance report shows citations of your content in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries.

Both report on your own site. Neither shows which other businesses were named, which is why the monthly test matters.

What should you fix first?

Start with any weight-3 item you answered “no.” Then work through listings, plain-text facts and service pages. If you would like the checks run for you, Ultruxy offers a free AI visibility audit.