Get your business ready to be found and recommended by AI.

Listing

A profile on a directory that someone maintains. This site does not operate one, and nothing here lists your business. If that changes it will be obvious, because you would have to fill something in.

Citation

Another source mentions or links your business, and an assistant can point at that source when it answers. Citations are the raw material. They are also the part you can actually influence.

Recommendation

An AI answer names your business to someone who asked for a recommendation. Nobody can guarantee this, including us, because the answer is generated fresh each time and no engine sells a slot in it.

1. Tell me about [business name]Filled in: Tell me about [your med spa]Whether the assistant knows the business exists at all.
2. [business name] in [city]Filled in: [your med spa] in HinsdaleWhether it can place the business in the right town without being told.
3. best [service] in [city]Filled in: best med spa for lip filler in NapervilleWhether the business is named when nobody asked for it by name.
4. Who should I hire for [service] in [city]?Filled in: Who should I hire for laser hair removal in Oak Brook?The hiring question, which is the one with money attached.

Nothing about the method is specific to med spas. For a plumber in the western suburbs the third prompt reads best emergency plumber in Berwyn, and the grid comes back the same shape. We will not pretend the prompt library is equally deep for every trade, but the sixteen cells are the sixteen cells.

1. You tell us the business, the city and the service

   We need those three because we ask the assistants the way a customer would ask, and a customer asks about a service in a place.

2. A person runs sixteen queries by hand

   Four questions across four assistants. We record what each one answered, whether it named you, and which businesses it named instead.

3. You get the grid and the reasons

   Within 2 business days, by email. Every result is shown individually, with the date it was asked and what was said.

Cited

The assistant named the business and linked or referenced a source for it.

Mentioned without citation

The assistant named the business but pointed to no source. This is weaker than a citation and is reported separately rather than counted as the same thing.

Not found

The assistant answered the question and did not name the business. The report records which businesses it named instead.

No AI answer

The assistant declined, or no AI Overview fired for that query. This is not evidence of invisibility and is never counted as a miss. It is reported as what it is: no answer to read.

The entity does not line up

The business is called one thing on its site, another on its Google Business Profile and a third on an old directory page. An assistant reading those cannot tell it is one business, so it names one it is sure about.

The site is thin where it matters

A homepage and a contact form does not tell an assistant what is offered, to whom, or where. Services stated only inside a booking tool are invisible to it.

The local profile is weak or stale

An unclaimed profile, the wrong category, old hours, no services listed. Assistants lean heavily on that record for local questions.

Nothing else on the web vouches for it

No reviews worth reading, no press, no third party page that mentions the business by name. Assistants prefer businesses other sources already talk about.

This site is run by Jeremy Bengtson of Search Sherpa, a search consultancy that works with med spas in Chicagoland. That is why the examples above are med spa examples: it is the category where we already know which questions customers ask and which competitors keep coming up. A person runs every check personally, so the queue is real and the depth of category knowledge varies by trade.

The audit itself is not restricted to med spas or to Chicagoland. Any local business can request one, and it gets the same sixteen dated cells.

What does the free AI visibility audit actually check?

It checks whether four AI assistants name your business when someone asks them for a recommendation in your category and city. We query ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot with the same four questions a potential customer would ask, which produces sixteen results in total. You get the full grid, not just a summary.

Is this automated, and how long does it take?

It is not automated. A person runs every query by hand and reads the answers, then writes the report. That takes longer than an instant tool, so the report arrives by email within two business days rather than in seconds. The tradeoff is that a human can tell the difference between your business being absent and an assistant simply declining to answer.

Can you submit my business to ChatGPT?

No, and nobody can. There is no submission office at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft or Perplexity that accepts a business for inclusion, and no engine sells a slot inside an answer. Assistants compose answers from what they can already read: your website, your Google Business Profile and other local profiles, review sites, and pages elsewhere that mention you by name. What can be changed is what those sources say about you and how clearly they say it, which is what the audit reports on.

Do you give a visibility score out of 100?

No. The sixteen cells get no number, because a composite score over sixteen non-deterministic answers would look precise and mean very little. You get the full grid instead, with the date each query was run and, for every miss, the businesses named instead of yours. The report also includes a public signal readiness checklist covering seven buckets of things anyone can observe about your business online, marked pass or fail per bucket. That checklist is not a score either, and we do not add it up.

Why would my business not appear in an AI answer?

Common reasons include your site blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt, having no structured data that identifies the business and what it does, thin or missing service pages, inconsistent name, address and phone details across the web, and simply having fewer third-party mentions than the competitors the assistant chose instead. The report identifies which of these apply to you.

What does it cost, and what happens after?

The audit is free and there is no obligation. If the report shows gaps and you want help closing them, we offer paid work to do that, but you are equally welcome to take the report and act on it yourself. We ask on the form whether you want options, and we respect the answer.

Is being mentioned by an AI assistant the same as ranking on Google?

No, they are different systems and a business can do well in one and poorly in the other. Traditional ranking places your page in a list of links. An assistant instead composes an answer and names a small number of businesses inside it, often without the user ever seeing a list. That is why a separate check is worth running.