AI search
AI search: why your business is not in the answer, and what actually moves it.
Yes, we work on whether your business shows up when someone asks an AI assistant for a supplier. The short answer: those answers are built mostly from sources outside your website — and being readable is not the same as being chosen.
We measure each AI assistant separately, publish the counts, and do not sell a score.
An AI answer
“Which suppliers do this near me?”
Built from
- Directories and listings
- Review platforms
- Other people’s lists
Your websiteReadable — not chosen
Why people ask
Worth sizing before you spend on it.
How people find out
Typed the company name into ChatGPT
Nothing useful
Asked it to recommend a supplier
A list without you
Ran a free AI checker
Absent — no reason given
AI discovery is real. Our reading — not a measurement — is that it is still much smaller than ordinary search.
We won’t put a share figure on it. Published numbers come from vendor panels nobody outside those vendors can audit. If enquiries must improve this quarter, this is not the work that does it.
What the work involves
Most of the work happens off your website.
On your website
Check AI can read your pages
Quick to check. Essential — and proves nothing on its own.
Pages worth quoting
Clear answers to real questions, with claims sourced and dated.
Everywhere else that describes you
Get listed where answers come from
The substantial part of the work — and it is not publishing.
- Directories and listings
- Review platforms
- Other people’s lists
Both places
Consistent facts about you
Name, services, location and contact details stated the same way everywhere. Inconsistency is how two AI assistants end up describing you differently.
In the answers
Measure each AI assistant separately
The same buyer questions, asked repeatedly, recorded with the date, place and language.
Training crawlers
Decide whether your pages can be used to train a model. Blocking one does not remove you from answers.
- GPTBotnot checked
- ClaudeBotchecked
- Google-Extendednot checked
- CCBotnot checked
Leads to: training data
Retrieval crawlers
Decide whether your pages can be read while an answer is being written. Needed — but not enough.
- OAI-SearchBotchecked
- Claude-SearchBotnot checked
- PerplexityBotnot checked
Leads to: an answer, now
Tags show what we checked on our own site on 31 August 2026. Which crawlers to allow is your decision; we set out the trade-offs.
Our own measurement
28 questions that didn’t name us. We appeared in none of the answers.
Measurement record
| Where we asked | Asked | We appeared |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Mode | 19 | 0 |
| Google AI OverviewsAnswered queries only | 3 | 0 |
| ChatGPT | 2 | 0 |
| PerplexitySigned-out version | 3 | 0 |
| GeminiSigned-out version; no sources shown | 1 | 0 |
| Total | 28 | 0 |
Could not be tested
- Claude needed a login.
- Grok needed a sign-up; no answer.
No data, so no claim — and not a zero.
Asked about us by name: 7 of 8 answers described us substantially accurately.
How we measured
- One “run” is one question that does not name us, asked once in one AI surface, on 31 August 2026, from one location, in English, signed out.
- Google AI Overviews: the three answered queries are counted. On a fourth, Google showed no AI Overview.
- Perplexity and Gemini were used in their signed-out versions, which give shorter answers. Gemini showed no sources at all, so its run could not show a citation.
- Crawler check: we requested our homepage identifying as OAI-SearchBot and as ClaudeBot — the names, not the companies’ own crawlers. Both were served the full page, and our robots.txt blocked no AI crawler. The other crawlers were not checked.
- Crawler names are as listed in each vendor’s own documentation, retrieved 31 August 2026.
- Counts, not rates. No confidence interval is claimed and none is available. The full dataset is kept for a future research page.
Directories were cited in at least 10 of the 28 answers.
One ChatGPT answer credited the agencies it named to two directories. When we measured, we had a profile on neither.
Our homepage was readable to the two AI crawlers we checked.
We still appeared zero times.
Being readable is necessary. It is not enough.
Retrieval
Can AI read your site?
Yes, for the two crawlers we checked
Discovery
Do you appear when buyers don’t name you?
0 of 28
Recommendation
Are you recommended?
0 of 28
Citation
Is your site quoted as a source?
0 of 28 · Gemini showed no sources
Claude and Grok
Not tested — no data, so no squares and no number.
Each square is one question. Counts, not rates.
What this does not show
- A trend — it is one round, on one day.
- Anything about Claude or Grok.
- Signed-in answers, other places or languages.
- Why we were absent — consistent with missing directory profiles, not proof of it.
- Whether AI answers bring enquiries.
What we won’t claim
There is no AI visibility score here, and there will not be one.
When we repeated questions on Google AI Mode, the order of names changed every time. Across different AI assistants, the names barely overlapped. One blended score would hide both.
- There is no “rank in ChatGPT” to be had.
- One round, on 31 August 2026, is not a trend — so we will not describe an improvement or a decline.
AI visibility score
Not produced
We do not promise
- appearance in any AI assistant
- a mention, citation or recommendation
- a position — there is no ranking
- an improvement, decline or percentage change
Nobody can, and the mechanism is largely outside anyone’s website.
What you get
Each AI assistant, looked at separately.
We ask the questions your buyers would ask, repeatedly, and record — for each assistant — whether you appeared, how, and which sources the answer used. The sources are the part you can act on.
We cannot give you a position, a score, or a meaningful comparison across assistants.
Assistant 1
- Appeared
- no data
- How
- no data
- Sources
- no data
Assistant 2
- Appeared
- no data
- How
- no data
- Sources
- no data
Assistant 3
- Appeared
- no data
- How
- no data
- Sources
- no data
Untested assistant
Shown as untested
Combined score
Not produced
Questions
What people ask us
Everyone sells this now — what makes you different?
In the same 28 questions, two agencies in our market that sell exactly this did not appear either. That is one sample, on one day — not a verdict on them. Selling the terminology is not the same as having the mechanism. We start with the diagnosis: which sources the answers are built from, and whether you are on them.
Ahrefs and Semrush give me a checker for free.
True, and they are good tools: they report the absence accurately. They do not show which sources the answer was built from, or do the off-site work that changes it. That is where the work is — the reporting part is free.
Can you get us into ChatGPT?
No — and nobody can honestly promise it. We fix your business facts, work on the sources answers are built from, measure whether anything changes, and tell you when it has not.
Related: organic search · the whole system
Where this fits
One place buyers look — and, as far as we can see, a small one.
It serves the same goal as all our work: enquiries you can act on, measured. If you are not found in ordinary search either, we would start there — and say so.