AI Visibility: Is ChatGPT Recommending You, or Your Competitor?

Your customer used to open Google and type "plumber Ipswich". Now a growing share of them open ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity and ask "who's a good plumber in Ipswich?" - and they get back one answer naming two or three businesses. There is no page two. You are either in that answer or you do not exist in it.

Most business owners have never checked. It takes about ten minutes to find out, and the result is usually one of three things: the assistant names you, it names your competitor, or it names nobody local at all and falls back to a directory. Each of those tells you something different about what to do next.

AI SEO, AEO, GEO - the same job under four names

This work gets sold under a pile of labels: AI SEO, answer engine optimisation (AEO), generative engine optimisation (GEO), LLM SEO, AI search optimisation. They describe the same underlying job - making sure the systems that now answer questions on your customer's behalf have the right information about you, and trust it enough to repeat it.

We do not much care what it gets called. We care whether an assistant names your business when someone asks for what you sell.

What we actually measure

• Cross-engine coverage - the same buying questions asked across ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, because they do not agree with each other and being named by one is not being named by all.
• Who gets named instead - the competitors an assistant recommends in your place, which is usually a much shorter and more surprising list than your Google competitors.
• What it says about you - assistants summarise as well as recommend, and sometimes the summary is out of date, thin, or quietly wrong about your services, your suburbs or your hours.
• Which sources it pulls from - the pages, directories and profiles the answer was built out of, so we know what to fix rather than guessing.

A good Google ranking helps. It does not decide the AI answer.

Ranking well in Google helps, but it does not decide the answer. Assistants lean heavily on things that have nothing to do with your position in the blue links: your Google Business Profile, your reviews and what those reviews actually say, whether your details are consistent across the web, and whether the question a customer asks is one your site clearly answers in plain language.

That is genuinely good news for a local business. The signals AI assistants read are the same ones that drive the Google Maps top three - which means the local SEO work that gets you into the map pack is doing double duty. We built our Google Maps Package around exactly those signals, and AI visibility tracking is included in it at no extra cost.

What actually moves it

• A complete, accurate Google Business Profile - the single biggest lever for local questions, same as it is for Maps.
• Reviews that mention the service and the suburb - assistants quote the language in reviews, so what customers write matters as much as the star rating.
• Consistent details everywhere - conflicting phone numbers and addresses across directories make a machine unsure enough to name someone else.
• Pages that answer the actual question - written the way a customer asks it, not the way an agency writes a service page. Question-shaped content is what gets quoted.
• Structured data - schema markup that states plainly what you do, where you do it, and what it costs, so nothing has to be inferred.
• Being crawlable by the AI crawlers at all - a surprising number of sites now block GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot by accident and have no idea they have made themselves invisible.

Where this sits in what we do

AI visibility is not a separate product you need to buy. Ongoing tracking is included in the Google Maps Package - $995 setup then $495/month, alongside your Maps rank report. If you want the underlying website and content strong enough to get quoted as well as listed, that is our local SEO service or full SEO.

And if you just want to know where you stand, ask for the free check below. We will run it and send you what came back, whether or not you ever buy anything.