Your customers are already asking AI who to hire. Finding out what it tells them takes about ten minutes, and you do not need any tools beyond the ones on your phone.
Before you start
Ask the way a stranger would. ChatGPT remembers things about you and your past chats, and that colours its answers. Use a private or incognito window where you are logged out, or a temporary chat, so you see what a homeowner sees.
Ask more than once. AI answers change from one try to the next. Ask each question two or three times and note what keeps coming back, not what showed up once.
Use three tools. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a plain Google search, where the AI Overview often sits above the normal results. They read the web differently, so they rarely agree.
The four questions
Swap in your own trade and the town you most want work in.
- "Who is the best deck builder in Irvine?" This is the question that matters most. Are you named at all?
- "Who installs composite decks near Irvine, California?" The same question, asked by service instead of by trade. It shows whether AI knows what you specifically do.
- "What does [your business name] do?" Whether it knows you exist, and whether what it says is right.
- "Is [your business name] any good?" What it says about your reputation, and where it got that from.
What to write down
For each answer, note four things:
- Were you mentioned? First, somewhere in the list, or not at all.
- Were your details right? Services, area, phone number, years, anything it states as fact.
- Who was mentioned instead? The names that keep appearing are the ones AI currently trusts in your trade.
- What did it cite? Perplexity and ChatGPT often link their sources. If they keep citing Yelp, Houzz or a particular directory, that is a place you need to be.
What to do with what you find
If your details are wrong, the fix is almost never in the AI. Find where the wrong detail lives, an old listing, an out-of-date directory, an old website, and correct it at the source.
If you are not mentioned at all, start with the seven steps in our guide to getting recommended. The first one, making sure AI crawlers can read your site, is often the whole problem.
If a competitor keeps getting named, look at what they have that you do not: more reviews, a page for every service, listings on the sites being cited. That is your list.
If you are named and right, keep doing what you are doing, and run the same four questions again next month. Write the date next to every result so you can see the change over time.
Want someone else to run it?
Every Kairo build runs this test before launch, so on delivery day you see where you start, and the Care Plan repeats it every month as AI search catches up. The free site check looks at your current site for nothing.