AI visibility, in plain words

How do I find out if AI chatbots like ChatGPT are recommending my business to customers?

Ask them the way a customer would. Open ChatGPT — or Claude, Gemini, Grok, or Perplexity — and type the question a buyer types: "Who's the best [your trade] near me?" or "What's the best [your product]?" Your business either comes up or it doesn't.

A manual spot-check has limits: it covers one engine, one phrasing, one moment in time, and engine answers change. A proper audit asks many buyer-style questions across the major AI engines and grades the answers — how often you're mentioned, where you rank, what's said about you, and whether the facts are right.

Vaunted does exactly that: a free snapshot shows you the headline, and the $79 Full Audit gives you the complete picture with verbatim engine quotes.

Why don't AI assistants like ChatGPT or Gemini ever mention my company when people ask for recommendations?

AI assistants recommend businesses they can read about. They build answers from your website's text, structured data, directories, reviews, and articles that mention you. If your site doesn't answer buyer questions in plain language, the engines quote someone who does — even when your work is better.

The common causes are fixable: a thin website, no structured data telling engines what you do and where, no content answering the questions buyers actually ask, and a reputation that lives in places crawlers can't see — word of mouth, private groups, photos with no text.

None of this is about company size or ad spend — AI engines don't sell placement. The gap is legibility, and legibility can be built.

Is there a way to check what ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity say about my business?

Yes, two ways. The free way: ask each engine directly, using the words a customer would use, and read what comes back. It's a real signal — just narrow, and it shifts with every model update.

The systematic way: an AI-visibility audit that puts the same buyer questions to the major AI engines, collects the live answers, and grades them — mention rate, answer rank, sentiment, and fact accuracy — with the engines' own words quoted back to you. That last part matters: what an engine actually says about you, verbatim, tells you more than any score.

Vaunted's Full Audit is built on exactly those live answers.

My competitors show up when people ask AI assistants for recommendations but I don't — what's going on?

The engines learned about your competitors and never learned about you. When an AI assistant answers "who should I hire," it leans on what it can read and quote: websites that answer buyer questions plainly, structured data, consistent listings, and reviews. Your competitors — or sometimes just the platforms and suppliers around your industry — have that quotable trail; your business doesn't yet.

The good news is that this gap is content, not budget. Engines don't take payment for recommendations, which means the businesses being named are beatable by any business willing to become easier to read. Find out exactly which questions you're losing and to whom, then publish the answers on your own site.

How can I tell if my small business is visible to AI search tools instead of just Google?

Test them separately, because they're different systems. Google visibility means your pages rank in a list of links — check it by searching your services and seeing where you land. AI visibility means assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity name your business inside their answers — check it by asking those tools buyer questions and reading who they recommend.

The two don't move together: plenty of businesses rank on page one of Google and never get named in an AI answer, because AI engines compose answers from what they can read and quote rather than ranking pages.

If the AI side comes back empty, that's your growth edge — an AI-visibility audit shows you precisely where you stand and what to fix first.