What Do AI Assistants Say About Your Brand?

A customer can now ask an AI assistant for a recommendation in your category and receive an answer written without you in the room. Most business owners I meet have never once checked what that answer says about them.

I have worked on search visibility for 13 years, and this is the newest version of a very old problem. Somebody else is describing your business, and if the description is wrong, you tend to find out late.

This is written for the owner who wants to know what is actually being said about their brand, whether it is accurate, and where the answers appear to be coming from. It covers what the question is really asking, where these answers show up, a prompt set you can run yourself, how to read the sources behind an answer, the patterns small businesses keep finding, what you can and cannot control, a one-page log, and how to turn the findings into next steps.

What this question is really asking

Mentions, citations and recommendations

Three different things get mixed together in the phrase "what does AI say about my brand". A mention is your name appearing somewhere in an answer. A citation is a page the answer names or links to. A recommendation is an answer that puts your business forward as one of the options worth considering.

They do not always arrive together. You can be named without being linked, and linked without being recommended, and the three are worth recording separately because they call for different responses.

Why it is not the same as a search ranking

A search ranking is a position on a list of links. An answer is a piece of prose that might mention three businesses, describe one of them in detail, and leave another out entirely.

The audience for that prose is large and growing. Per a Pew Research survey, "Today, 34% of U.S. adults say they have ever used ChatGPT", and "That includes a 58% majority of adults under 30." A business that ranks well and is still absent from the answers is not as visible as its rankings suggest.

Where the answers appear

Assistants, AI summaries and chat answers

Ask a direct question in a chat assistant and you get one kind of answer. Search for the same thing and a summary may sit above the ordinary results. Ask a voice assistant and you may get a spoken recommendation with almost no detail.

Each of those is a different surface with a different audience, and a business can be present on one and missing from the next.

The behaviour around those summaries has already shifted. Per the Semrush AI search statistics roundup, "When Google shows an AI summary, only 8% of users click on the regular search results below it. Without a summary, that number nearly doubles to 15%." Whatever a business makes of the summary itself, the attention underneath it is moving.

Why each surface can say something different

They are separate products, built separately, and they do not all describe a business the same way on the same day. That is why a single answer should never be treated as the whole picture. Saying that each surface can differ does not mean we can see inside them, and no business should read this as an explanation of how any platform chooses what to say, which is not something I claim to know.

The differences show up in the research. Per SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index, "According to the 2026 LVI, only 1.2% of brand locations are recommended by ChatGPT, 11.0% by Gemini, and 7.4% by Perplexity." Those are United States multi-location brands, and the gap between the three numbers is the point: the same business can be recommended on one surface and absent from another.

How to check what assistants say

A repeatable prompt set

Write down six to ten questions your customers would actually ask, and use the same set every time. Questions like who is the best option for a service in your area, how much does it cost, are they any good, who specialises in this, and which ones should I compare.

Ask them on more than one platform. Asking the same set on a single assistant tells you about that assistant, not about the picture your customers are seeing.

Recording answers, dates and sources

Copy the answer out in full, note the date, the platform and the exact question, and record whether you were mentioned, cited, recommended, or absent. Do it in one document rather than scattered across screenshots.

Behaviour around these answers is worth understanding. Per Semrush's summary of AI search statistics, "Roughly 60% of searches now yield no clicks", which is one reason a business can be busy and still have no idea why the phone is quiet.

Reading the sources behind an answer

What the citations point to

Where an answer links to something, open it. Where it names a source without linking, search for the page and read it. Then write down what kind of page it is: your own site, a directory, a review site, a news article, or a competitor.

Do this for several answers and a pattern usually appears. Your own pages tend to carry the factual detail about your business, while third-party pages often carry the comparisons.

Noticing which pages are doing the work

Over a few rounds, the same handful of pages keeps turning up. Those are the pages shaping what the answer says, and they are worth reading closely for anything out of date or misleading.

Note it as an observation, not a mechanism. You are watching which pages the answers point to and what they say, not working out a ranking system, and treating it as observation keeps the exercise honest.

Patterns small businesses keep finding

Outdated facts, wrong locations, old pricing

The most common finding is stale detail. A former address, a service that was discontinued three years ago, a price from before the last increase, a trading name the business no longer uses.

None of it is a conspiracy. It is simply that older pages describing the business are still being read, and nothing has corrected them.

Competitors named where you are not

The second most common finding is the presence of competitors and the absence of you. It is worth writing down which competitors appear and on which questions, because that tells you which parts of your own story are least visible.

The gaps are informative even when they sting. A question where five competitors appear and you do not is a specific, fixable list of pages that describe your business badly or not at all.

What you can control and what you cannot

Pages you own and publish

You control the pages on your own site, and that is where to start. A clear description of what the business does, who runs it, where it operates, who it serves and how to reach it, written plainly and kept current, is the most useful thing a business can put in place.

If those pages are vague or out of date, the description that reaches a customer is likely to be vague or out of date too.

Third-party pages you do not

Directories, review sites, news mentions and industry listings are outside your control, but many of them will correct a factual error if you ask. Claim the profiles you can, fix the details that are wrong, and accept that some pages will keep saying what they say.

There is no switch that changes an answer. What you can influence is the accuracy and clarity of the material that describes your business, wherever it sits.

Keeping a simple record over time

A one-page log that takes ten minutes

Keep one page with four columns: date, platform, question, and what the answer said about you, including which sources it named. Date each entry, because a trend is only visible when the entries are dated.

Ten minutes a quarter is enough for a small business. The value is not in any single entry, it is in being able to see that a fact was wrong in March and fixed by the June check.

When it is worth re-checking

Quarterly suits most small businesses. Check more often during a period of change: a rebrand, a new location, a new service, a price change, or a merger. Those are exactly the moments when an old description starts costing you customers.

The trend matters more than any single day's answer, and an answer that was wrong once is not a crisis. An answer that has been wrong for a year is worth acting on.

Turning findings into next steps

Fixing your own pages first

Start with what you own. Rewrite the pages an answer cited where the details are wrong, and add the facts that are missing from the pages it did not cite. Where the answer leaves out a location or a service entirely, that usually means your own pages do not describe them clearly enough.

The AI search visibility guide is the place to work through that systematically rather than page by page. Where the question is AI visibility work across a whole site, that is a wider job. A look at what I actually do explains where that fits, and the case studies show what this looks like in practice.

Deciding when to ask for help

Do this yourself if you have a few pages and the findings are simple. Bring in help when the gaps are structural, when several pages and profiles need fixing at once, or when the same wrong description keeps reappearing across sources you do not control.

Run the check this week either way, and write the answers down. That record is what turns a confusing question into a list of specific things to fix.

Frequently asked questions

How do I check what AI assistants say about my business?

Ask them directly, on more than one platform, using the questions your customers would use, and write down exactly what came back. Use the same prompt set each time so answers can be compared later, and note the date, because these answers change.

Why does each AI assistant give a different answer?

They are separate products built in different ways, and they do not all draw on the same information at the same moment. Two assistants can name different competitors for the same question, so treat each platform as its own observation rather than trying to combine them into one number.

Can I get an AI assistant to change what it says about my brand?

Not directly. What you can do is control what you publish and how clearly your business, services and locations are described, and improve the third party pages that describe you. There is no switch that updates an answer.

Where do the answers seem to come from?

Look at the sources the answer links to or names, and note which pages are doing the work. Often it is your own site for facts about your business and a third party page for comparisons, which tells you where to put your effort next.

How often should we check?

Quarterly is a reasonable rhythm for most Australian small businesses, and more often during a period of change such as a rebrand, a new location or a service change. The trend matters more than any single day's answer.

Is this the same as SEO?

No. Search rankings are one input, but these answers also reflect how your business is described elsewhere on the web. A business can rank well in search results and still be left out of an assistant's answer entirely.