AI
How to Check Whether AI Assistants Recommend Your Business
By the Coast Creative team5 min read
More people ask an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of scrolling search results. They type something like "best roofer in Pasadena" or "good listing agent in Silver Lake" and get three names back. If yours isn't one of them, you never find out. No ranking report, no notification, nothing.
So check it yourself. It takes twenty minutes and tells you more than most paid audits do.
Run the test the way a customer would
Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI answers. Ask each one the questions a real customer would ask. Not "tell me about Miller Plumbing" — that's a name search, and it proves nothing. Ask the discovery questions: "Who should I call for a slab leak in Glendale?" "Which real estate agents know the Eagle Rock market well?" "I need a designer for a small restaurant website in Los Angeles."
Ask five to ten of these. Write down every business the assistant names. Then run a second round with your name in it: "What do you know about Miller Plumbing in Glendale?" Note whether the answer is right, wrong, thin, or a polite admission that it has no idea.
Do this in a logged-out window so your own history doesn't skew the answer, and run it more than once. These systems don't give identical answers every time.
Read the results honestly
You'll land in one of four spots.
Not mentioned at all. The assistant doesn't know you exist in that category. This is the most common result for small businesses, and it's the one worth working on.
Mentioned, but with wrong details. Old address, a service you dropped two years ago, a phone number from a previous office. Usually this means stale information is sitting somewhere public and the model picked it up.
Mentioned thinly. It knows your name and nothing else, so it can't make a case for you over the competitor it just described in three sentences.
Mentioned well. Good. Now read what it says about your competitors, because that's the comparison a buyer sees.
Fix the source material, not the prompt
You can't optimize an AI assistant the way you optimize a keyword. What you can do is make sure the material it reads is clear, current, and specific.
Start with the pages that describe what you actually do. A services page that says "full-service solutions for discerning clients" gives an assistant nothing to repeat. A page that says "We handle slab leak detection and repair for homes in Glendale, La Cañada, and Eagle Rock, usually within the same week" gives it a sentence it can hand to someone. Write the plain version. Name the services, name the cities, name who it's for.
Then check the places that feed these systems facts about you: your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, your industry directories, your LinkedIn page. If those disagree with each other about your address or your service area, you've handed the model a reason to be vague. Make them match.
Add structured data to your site — the behind-the-scenes markup that states your business type, location, hours, and services in a format software reads without guessing. It won't make you famous, but it removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what gets you left out.
Publish something that answers a real question. Assistants quote pages that explain things. A contractor who writes a straight page about what a permit actually costs in their county has given every AI system a reason to cite them. A generic post about the importance of quality workmanship has not.
And consider an llms.txt file, a simple text file that lists your key pages in plain language so AI crawlers can find the important material without wading through your navigation. It's cheap to add and it's becoming a normal part of a well-built site.
Watch for the fake fixes
There are already services selling "AI ranking" packages. Be careful. Nobody can guarantee a spot in an answer generated fresh each time, and anyone promising one is selling a report, not a result.
The tactics that work are unglamorous: accurate listings, specific writing, clean markup, real reviews from real customers, and being mentioned by other sites that a model already trusts. A write-up in a local paper or a trade association directory does more than a hundred stuffed keywords.
Set a reminder and check again
Run the same questions every quarter. Keep the list of prompts in a note so you're comparing the same things over time. You're watching for two shifts: whether you start appearing at all, and whether the description of you gets sharper.
This is slower and less predictable than a search ranking. But the underlying work is the same work that helps a human visitor decide to call you. Be specific about what you do, be consistent about where you are, and put real answers on the page instead of adjectives.
When we build a site at Coast Creative, that's the layer we care about most: clean structure, honest copy, and the technical markup that lets both people and software understand the business behind it. The AI visibility tends to follow from doing that well.
If you run the test and come back with nothing, don't panic. Six months ago almost everyone came back with nothing. The businesses fixing it now are the ones that get named next year.