Free tool · Diagnostic

Where is the AI actually looking?

An answer engine knows nothing about your business. It reads other websites and repeats what they say. So the useful question was never “am I in AI answers” — it’s which sites is it reading, and am I on them? That set is different for a plumber than for a dentist than for an inn, and getting it wrong means working hard on the sources that don’t decide anything.

Every other tool measures the symptom

There is now a large and growing industry of tools that will tell you whether ChatGPT mentions your business. We build several of them ourselves, and they’re useful. But a visibility score is a symptom reading. It tells you the engine named somebody else; it does not tell you why, and it does not tell you what to go and do about it on a Tuesday evening.

The why is almost always the same. The engine read a handful of third-party sources, and you weren’t on them, or you were on them with a phone number you changed in 2022.

Walled gardens and town squares

Categories don’t work the same way, and this is the part that most generic advice gets wrong.

• A walled gardenOne platform effectively controls the answer. Real estate is the clearest case — if you’re an agent and your Zillow profile is thin, being immaculate on six general directories will not save you. Healthcare and lodging behave similarly. In a walled garden, the gatekeeper gets most of your effort and the general directories are insurance.
• A town squareNo gatekeeper. Home services, restaurants, most retail. Engines build the answer by cross-checking several general trust sources and looking for agreement. Here, appearing consistently across several sites beats being excellent on one — which is genuinely good news, because it’s a game a one-van operation can win.

The tool works out which one you’re in from the category you already typed, says so in a sentence, and then orders the list accordingly — heaviest group first, so “start at the top” is always the right instruction.

The tier nobody else models

The enterprise platforms that study this are built for brands with a hundred to ten thousand locations. Their models of where AI looks are entirely national, and they have to be: no single town’s sources move the number when you have four thousand stores.

For one inn in one town, that model is missing the tier that decides it. When the question has a place name in it — and local questions always do — engines reach for the chamber of commerce directory, the regional magazine’s roundup, the neighbourhood thread. A national dataset rounds those off as noise. They are also, by a distance, the cheapest sources to win, because there is a human being on the other end who answers email.

So this tool has three tiers, not two: the national trust anchors, your category’s own platforms, and the local layer.

What this doesn’t do, said plainly

It does not check the sources for you. Automatically auditing a business’s presence across a dozen directories costs real money per lookup, which is why the platforms that do it are priced for chains — and why several of them have replaced their price with a form asking for your mobile number. You open each link, search for yourself, and tap a box: not checked, listed and correct, or missing and wrong. The tool does the ordering, the reasoning, and the arithmetic, keeps the record in your browser, and charges nothing.

We also link every source to its front door rather than deep into its claim flow. Those URLs change constantly, and a dead link on a Tuesday evening is how you decide the whole thing is junk.

Questions

The other five

All six tools share one set of business details — fill them in once and switch between tools without retyping anything.