How to tell if AI assistants can find your business: a 10-minute self-audit

A growing share of your future customers no longer start with a Google search. They describe their problem to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini and ask who can solve it. Those assistants answer with specific businesses: the ones they can find, verify, and quote. Recently a business owner asked an AI assistant to recommend a marketing consultant, got a name, and hired her. The consultant never knew the conversation happened until the inquiry arrived.

So the question worth ten minutes of your time: when a buyer asks AI about your category, do you exist? Here is how to find out.

Step 1 · Ask the assistants what they ask (4 minutes)

Open two or three assistants (a free ChatGPT and Claude account is enough) and ask the questions your customer would ask, not the ones you would. Three templates:

Record three things: are you named, are your competitors named, and what sources the assistant cites when it answers. Those sources are the map of where you need to exist.

Step 2 · Check whether your site is quotable (3 minutes)

AI assistants recommend businesses they can quote. Open your own site and check honestly:

• One paragraph, one answer. Could a single paragraph from your site answer a buyer's question on its own, without the rest of the page? That is what an assistant lifts.
• Real facts, stated plainly. Prices or price ranges, years in business, who you serve, named results. "Contact us to learn more" gives AI nothing to say.
• A page of direct answers. A real FAQ that answers the questions buyers actually ask, not three soft ones.

Step 3 · The one-minute technical check

• Visit yoursite.com/llms.txt, a plain-language summary file AI crawlers read. Most sites don't have one yet, which is exactly why having one matters.
• Search your business name in quotes plus your city. If the top results are stale directories with wrong details, assistants see those too.

Step 4 · Check where AI gets its evidence (2 minutes)

Assistants trust third-party sources more than your own site. Search for the lists and directories in your category ("best [category] in [region]"), and check: are you in them? Do you have reviews anywhere a crawler can read? Has anyone else on the internet ever written about you? One genuine third-party mention outweighs ten pages of self-description.

Scoring your audit

• You're named by an assistant: rare today. Protect the sources that produced it.
• Competitors named, you're not: the most common result. Fix in order: quotable site, direct-answer page, llms.txt, then two or three third-party listings.
• Nobody in your category is named: your market's answer seat is empty. The first business that structures itself for AI gets quoted by default. That is a genuine early-mover window.

This is the exact audit we run (in much more depth) for clients at Bloom & Scale, and the fixes are systematic rather than magic: structured data, quotable pages, honest numbers, and citations in the places assistants read. If your ten minutes produced uncomfortable results, that is fixable.