Do AI assistants mention your business? A 15-minute self-check

You can find out roughly where you stand with AI visibility in the time it takes to drink a coffee. No tool required for the first pass, just a handful of direct questions and a careful read of the answers.

Step 1: ask the assistants directly

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google (watching for an AI Overview) and ask each the same three questions: "[your service] in [your city]", "best [your category] near [your area]", and a direct "what is [your business name]". Note whether you appear, whether the facts given about you are correct, and whether a competitor appears instead.

Step 2: check whether the doors are even open

None of this works if the relevant crawler cannot reach your site. Perplexity's own documentation is explicit about PerplexityBot's job: "PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models." Look at your robots.txt and your security plugin or CDN's bot-blocking settings for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. A single overlooked firewall rule can silently block all of them.

Step 3: read your own top pages like a model would

Open your three most important pages and ask: is there one plain sentence stating what we do, where, and for whom, in text, not an image? Is there a real number or named source anywhere on the page? The 2024 Princeton-led GEO study (arXiv:2311.09735) found that adding exactly this kind of citation and statistic raised a page's odds of being quoted in a generative answer by up to 40%, the single biggest lever the researchers tested.

Why this check is worth doing now

OpenAI reported ChatGPT passed 800 million weekly active users at its October 2025 DevDay. Whatever share of your customers that represents in your market, it is growing, not shrinking, and it is one of the cheaper audits you will run all quarter.

What to do with what you find

• Missing entirely: check crawler access first, then whether your core pages state who you are in plain text.
• Appearing with wrong facts: fix the source, usually your Google Business Profile or an outdated page, since assistants tend to repeat what they find most consistently.
• A competitor appears instead: read their page for the exact direct-answer sentence and sourced stat yours is missing.

Quick answers

Is there a faster way to check this than asking assistants manually?

Manually asking is the most direct first pass and costs nothing. A scan tool can speed up the crawler-access and page-structure checks that feed into it.

How often should I re-run this check?

Quarterly is enough for most small business sites, or after any redesign, migration, or change to your security or CDN settings.

Run a free scan at RankMerlin to check crawler access and page structure in one pass instead of by hand, no account needed.