AI search visibility
Try this before you read any further
Open ChatGPT and type: “Recommend three {your trade} in {your suburb}.”
Then do the same in Perplexity. Write down who it names.
For most Australian businesses the answer is a competitor, a directory, or a confident hedge about how the user should “check local reviews”. Somebody gets named in that answer. This site is about becoming one of them.
What actually changed
The old shape of a search was ten blue links and a human deciding between them. Your job was to be one of the ten. If you came fifth you still got clicks, because the person was doing the choosing.
The new shape is a paragraph. Someone asks an assistant a question and gets back an answer with two or three names in it. There is no fifth place in a paragraph. You are either in the sentence or you are not mentioned, and the person asking never learns you existed.
That is a harsher distribution than search ever was, and it is being decided by systems most businesses have never checked they are visible to.
Four things we check first
Before anything clever, these are the reasons a business is usually invisible. Most of them are mechanical and most are fixable.
Can the crawlers reach you at all
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are separate user agents from Googlebot. Plenty of Australian sites block them by accident, usually through a Cloudflare bot rule nobody remembers turning on.
Does your claim survive being quoted alone
An assistant lifts a sentence or two out of context. If the sentence needs the three paragraphs above it to make sense, it does not get used.
Is the answer on your site or only in your head
Prices, service areas, lead times, what you will not take on. Assistants cannot infer any of it. Pages that answer those questions plainly get quoted; brochure copy does not.
Does anyone else say it about you
A model weighs corroboration. One self-description on one domain is weak. The same fact on a directory, an association register and a supplier list is not.
Write things that survive being quoted
This is the part most people find annoying, because it means giving up the hedging that marketing copy is built on. An assistant needs a sentence it can lift and stand behind.
Never gets quoted
“We offer a comprehensive range of tailored solutions designed to meet the unique needs of every client.”
Gets quoted
“We service commercial kitchens within 40 km of the Melbourne CBD, attend breakdowns within four hours, and do not take on domestic work.”
The second one is useful to a machine composing an answer for somebody in Footscray with a broken cool room. The first one is useful to nobody.
Who this suits
Being straight about it saves us both a meeting.
Worth doing
- Considered purchases where people research before they call.
- Categories with a handful of credible suppliers, not thousands.
- Businesses with real constraints worth publishing: coverage, capability, what you decline.
- B2B and professional services, where the buyer is already using assistants at work.
Probably not yet
- Impulse retail, where nobody asks an assistant first.
- Anyone with no website worth crawling. Fix that before this.
- Businesses that cannot say anything specific about what they do.
- Anyone wanting a guaranteed position. It does not exist here.
Common questions
It overlaps, and anyone who tells you it does not is selling something. Crawlability, clear structure and real expertise help in both. What differs is the target: Google ranks a list of pages and the user picks one, whereas an assistant composes a single answer and names two or three businesses. Coming tenth in Google still gets you a click. Coming tenth here gets you nothing at all.
No, and be careful with anyone who does. There is no ranking dashboard, no submission form and no ranking factor list. What we can do is remove the mechanical reasons you are excluded, make your claims quotable, and measure whether mentions improve across repeated prompts over time.
We run a fixed set of prompts against several assistants before we start and record what comes back, including which competitors are named and which sources are cited. We re-run the same prompts on the same schedule afterwards. It is not a rank tracker, but it is repeatable and you can read it yourself.
That is a real position and some businesses take it, particularly publishers whose product is the content itself. If your product is a service and you want to be recommended, blocking the crawlers guarantees you will not be. We go through the trade-off properly on the AI crawlers page rather than assuming.
Crawler access issues can resolve in days once fixed. Content and corroboration work on the timescale of the models refreshing their retrieval and their training data, which realistically means months, not weeks. Anyone promising a fortnight is guessing.
Start with the prompts
Tell us your category and where you operate. We will run a set of prompts across several assistants and send you what comes back, including who is being named instead of you and which sources they are pulling from.
Get the baseline