The short answer: open ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode, ask five questions about your own business, and write down what comes back. You’ll land in one of four places: it has the facts right, it has them wrong, it has never heard of you, or it knows you and recommends someone else. Each has a different fix, and none of the fixes involve paying an “AI visibility” agency. You can’t edit an AI answer. You can edit what it reads.
Why bother
Customers are already doing this. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of US consumers found 45% had used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier. Among the AI users, 63% said they trust those recommendations, and 97% at least sometimes double-check them against real reviews.
Closer to home, PwC New Zealand surveyed 1,000 New Zealand consumers who use AI when they shop, and its advice to businesses includes a line worth stealing: “Assess how your brand, products and services appear across major AI platforms.” PwC is talking to big retailers. The small-business version takes ten minutes and costs nothing.
The 10-minute check
Use at least two assistants: ChatGPT, and Google’s AI Mode inside Google Search. Add Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity if you have one handy. Ask these five, swapping in your details:
- “What do you know about [business name] in [town]?”
- “What are the opening hours and phone number for [business name] in [town]?”
- “Does [business name] in [town] do [a service you offer]?”
- “Who would you recommend for [your trade] in [town]?”
- “Is [business name] in [town] any good?”
Write down what each one says, and which sources or links it shows. Two warnings. Answers vary from one ask to the next, so treat a single reply as a sample. And don’t correct it mid-chat then ask again; you’re testing what a stranger would see.
Reading the result
| What came back | What it means | Where to go |
|---|---|---|
| Right name, right hours, right number | Your public facts are clear and consistent | Keep them that way; re-check after any change of hours |
| Wrong hours, old number, old address | A stale listing somewhere is being believed | Fix 1 |
| ”I couldn’t find information about that business” | There’s nothing readable to find | Fix 2 |
| It describes a different business with a similar name | Your identity isn’t distinct in text | Fix 3 |
| It knows you, and recommends others | Competition, not a fault | Fix 4 |
Fix 1: wrong details
Look at the links the assistant showed. The culprit is usually there: a directory listing from a previous address, a Facebook page with 2022 hours, a Business Profile nobody updated. Correct each one, working from a single master record so every listing says exactly the same thing. The master-record method takes an afternoon. Then make your own website the plainest statement of the truth: name, address, phone and hours as typed text.
Fix 2: it has never heard of you
An assistant can only repeat what it can read. No website, an unclaimed Business Profile and a Facebook page behind a login add up to nothing to quote. The order that works: claim and complete your Google Business Profile, then get one page live that says what you do, where, and when, in text. One page is enough.
If you do have a website and still got a blank, check it isn’t shutting the door. Open yourdomain.co.nz/robots.txt. OpenAI’s documentation says “OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”, and that sites opted out of it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”. A Disallow rule against OAI-SearchBot, or against all crawlers, is the problem. Some hosting and security tools also have a “block AI bots” switch; if yours is on, ask whether it blocks search crawlers or only training ones. OpenAI treats those separately: GPTBot is the training crawler, and refusing it doesn’t remove you from ChatGPT search.
For Google’s AI Mode the test is simpler. Google says a page only has to be indexed and eligible to show in normal Search with a snippet. If your site isn’t in Google at all, start here.
Fix 3: it thinks you’re someone else
This one happened to us. In August 2026 a ChatGPT conversation about onedollar.co.nz couldn’t read our pages and attached us to an unrelated company with a similar name, registered years before we existed. Nothing malicious; the assistant filled a gap with the nearest match.
What we did about it is what we’d suggest to anyone with a common trading name: state in plain text who is legally behind the business. We published our legal entity and NZBN, our registered address, and a link to the Companies Register, on the site and in its structured data. It’s all on the “is it legit” page. For a local business the equivalent is your full trading name, street address, town and phone in text on the page, identical to your Business Profile, so there’s only one business those details can belong to.
Fix 4: it knows you, and recommends someone else
This isn’t an error, and no one can promise to change it. Assistants lean on what local search has always leaned on: whether your page clearly says the trade and the town, whether your details agree everywhere, and what your reviews say. The third is where most of the gap usually is. How to get more genuine reviews, without buying them. And the wider guide to being found in AI search covers the rest.
Do it again in a month
Put a repeat in your calendar. The check is only useful as a before and after: same five questions, same assistants, note what moved. Changes to public listings take time to flow through, and there is no published timetable for any of these tools, so don’t read much into a single week.
Where a $1-a-day site fits
If the check came back blank because there’s no website to read, that’s the gap LaunchPad fills: one page with your facts as text, schema markup naming your exact business type, and crawler settings that welcome search and AI bots, itemised here so you can verify it. $1 a day: $365 + GST a year ($419.75 incl. GST), build free during launch, domain in your name. No promise about what any assistant will say, because that isn’t ours to promise. Search for your business on the home page; in the towns we’ve built ahead, the site may already exist.