This 20-Minute Audit Shows How AI Sees Your Business

By Marc Shorb

Not long ago, someone checking out a business would search Google, skim a few results, and click through to a website or two. That habit has shifted fast. A lot of people now skip the search results entirely and just ask their question to an AI tool.

The numbers back this up. In a recent Clear Spark Digital survey of 2,127 U.S. adults, 97.6% said they’ve used tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot to find information. Almost half (48%) use these tools every day. And 78.5% have made a real-life decision based on something an AI tool told them.

So here’s a question worth considering. When someone asks AI about your industry or the exact problem you solve, does your name or your business come up? Most business owners have no idea. The good news is you can find out in about 20 minutes or less.

Why This Is Worth 20 Minutes

When someone types “best [your service]” or “who’s a good expert on [your topic]” into an AI tool, they get back a tidy answer with a few names attached. Being on that short list, or missing from it, shapes who gets the call.

What makes this matter even more is how people treat those answers. AI tools sound confident, and that confidence sticks. The same survey found that 68% of Americans trust AI search results as much as or more than traditional Google results. Even the people who double-check tend to do it lightly. About 72% fall back on a Google search to verify the information they get from AI, and fewer than half ever look at the actual sources the AI cites.

Run the Audit

Here are the basic steps:

1. Write down the questions a potential customer would actually ask. Use plain language instead of your branded terms. Things like “who can help me with X,” “best option for a small business that needs Y,” or “is Z actually worth it.”
2. Ask those questions in more than one tool. ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity often give different answers and cite different sources, so checking only one leaves you with a partial picture.
3. For each answer, note where you stand. Do you show up? Do your competitors? And which sources is the tool leaning on to build its response?
4. Study the cited sources. This is the step almost everyone skips. The publications, directories, and pages an AI tool pulls from are the exact spots that earn a business its place in the answer. Some tools show those citations right in the response, and Perplexity in particular is upfront about where its information comes from.

Read the Gaps

Once you’ve run a handful of queries, the results usually fall into one of a few buckets.

Maybe your competitors show up and you don’t. In that case, look at where they’re being cited that you aren’t. That becomes your starting list.

Maybe nobody in your space shows up clearly. That’s an opening. The category is wide open, and showing up early and consistently tends to pay off.

Or maybe you do show up, but the details are wrong or out of date. The tool is leaning on a stale source somewhere, and you’ve got some cleanup to do on the pages it’s pulling from.

The thread running through all of this is that the sources AI trusts are a map. You’re reverse-engineering where you need to show up to land in the answer.

Close the Gaps

Finding the gaps is the easy part. Closing them takes longer, but the direction is clear.

Get mentioned and cited in the sources AI already trusts for your topic. Credible coverage and expert commentary in publications your audience respects are how you work your way into those answers over time.

Keep your own website and profiles accurate and current, too, since AI often grabs the basic facts about you straight from those pages.

Then run the audit again in a few months. The answers move as the tools update, and as new content gets indexed, so a one-time check won’t hold up for long.

The businesses that treat AI answers as a place they can show up, rather than something happening to them, are the ones that’ll own their corner of the market as this next chapter of search plays out.

Author Bio: Marc Shorb is the founder of Clear Spark Digital and a digital marketer with nearly two decades of experience building and growing online businesses.