You can spend money on AI visibility tools, or you can spend ten minutes finding out where you actually stand. Start with the ten minutes. Here are eight questions to work through, in order. The first three you can answer right now with your phone. The rest take a look at your own website.
Ask the AI assistants the question your buyers ask, with your city in it, and see who they name. Then check whether your website gives those assistants something to quote: a plain description of your service and area, structured data, consistent listings, and recent reviews. If most of those are missing, AI has little reason to name you.
Ask the assistants directly
1. Does AI name you for your main service?
Open ChatGPT and type the question a buyer would type: "who should replace my roof in [your city]" or "best [your service] near [your city]". Do you come up? Write down who does. If the same competitor shows up twice across assistants, that is not luck.
2. Do the other assistants agree?
Ask the same question in Gemini and Perplexity. Each builds its answer differently. Perplexity shows its sources, so read the footnotes: those pages are where the answer came from. If you are named in one assistant but not the others, you have a partial foothold, not a position.
3. Does AI name anyone at all?
Sometimes the answer names no specific business and points to a directory instead. That is open ground. In most local categories no one has claimed the answer yet, which means the seat is empty rather than taken.
Look at your own website
4. Does your homepage say what you do and where, in plain words?
AI assistants quote text. A site that opens with "Quality You Can Trust Since 1998" gives them nothing. The page needs the boring sentence: "We replace and repair roofs in [town], [town], and the [metro] area." Service and place, in one line. If that sentence is not on the page, add it.
5. Is there a page for each service you offer?
One page per service, each answering what it costs, how long it takes, and who it suits. Those are the exact questions buyers ask AI, so the page that answers them is the page that gets quoted. A single homepage trying to rank for everything ranks for nothing.
6. Do you have structured data?
Structured data is a small block of code that labels your facts for machines: business name, service type, area served, hours, reviews. Visitors never see it. Machines read it first. View your page source and search for "application/ld+json". If it is missing, that is the single clearest signal you can add, and it is an afternoon of work.
7. Do your listings agree with each other?
Pull up your Google Business Profile, your Yelp page, and your website. Do the name, address, and phone match exactly, letter for letter? AI assistants cross-check. Three half-matching records read as a business they cannot quite trust. Fix the big listings first.
8. Are your reviews recent?
The competitor AI keeps naming usually has a steady stream of recent reviews. A high count from five years ago does not carry the same weight. Reviews give AI proof you are active and sentences it can quote about what you are good at. Ask after every job, the day the work is done, and reply to every one.
What your answers mean
If you are named in question 1 and your site passes 4 through 8, you are in a strong position. Defend it. If AI names competitors and your site fails two or three of the website checks, that is good news: the gap is fixable, and it is usually two or three specific things, not everything. Start with the words on the page, then the structured data, then the listings. Reviews build while you do the rest.
A free Named In AI check asks the real buyer questions across the assistants, reads your site for the signals above, and hands you a score plus the exact fixes, ranked. It takes about a minute and there is no charge.