There is a conversation happening about your business that you are not part of.
Somebody is asking an assistant whether you are any good. Somebody else is asking which company in your town they should use. The answers are being given, confidently, in a few sentences, and then acted upon. And unlike a review you can read or a search result you can look at, most owners have never once seen what is being said.
The reassuring part is that finding out takes about fifteen minutes. Here is exactly how.
In short: ask the assistants directly, in a fresh conversation, using the words a customer would use. Eight questions, across two or three assistants, with the answers written down. Then work backwards from anything wrong to the source that caused it, because you can only fix the source.
How to run the test properly
Three rules first, or your results will be misleading.
Use a fresh conversation, not signed into an account that knows you. If you have spent months talking to an assistant about your own business, it will treat you differently from a stranger. Start clean.
Ask the way a customer would. Not "tell me about my company". A customer does not know your business name half the time. They ask for the best plumber in a town, or where to get an implant near a neighbourhood.
Check more than one. ChatGPT, Google's assistant, Perplexity, and whatever else is common where you are. They use different sources and give genuinely different answers, and a business can be well known to one and invisible to another.
Write the answers down, word for word, in a document with the date on it. You will want to compare in three months.
The eight questions to ask
One: who are the best businesses of your type in your town? The most important question, because it is what a customer with no preference actually asks. Are you named? Who else is? What is said about them that is not said about you?
Two: the same question, but with your neighbourhood or a nearby town. Local coverage is uneven. You may be named in one area and absent in the next.
Three: your business name, plus "is it any good". Now you are looking at reputation rather than discovery. What does it say, and where has it got that from?
Four: your business name plus the service you most want to sell. Does it know you do that? Many businesses discover the assistant knows them for a service they no longer emphasise.
Five: your opening hours, your address and your phone number. The most common source of factual errors, and the most damaging, because a customer sent to the wrong place or arriving when you are closed does not usually come back.
Six: how much does your type of service cost in your area. Notice whether you are mentioned, and whether the numbers quoted are anywhere near reality. If an assistant is quoting a figure far below what you charge, you will be having some difficult conversations.
Seven: your business compared with a named competitor. Uncomfortable and extremely informative. It shows you exactly which of their strengths are visible and which of yours are not.
Eight: a question a nervous customer would ask. Do they take children, is it painful, do they offer emergency callouts, are they insured. The practical worry that decides a booking.
Reading the answers
You will get one of four results, and each means something different.
It does not know you exist. The most common outcome for small businesses, and it is a visibility problem rather than a reputation problem. You are not documented in enough places for an assistant to be confident naming you.
It knows you but describes you thinly. A sentence or two, correct but bland, while a competitor gets three sentences of specifics. This means the sources about you are shallow. The fix is more detail in more places.
It says something wrong. The most urgent result, and the most fixable, because wrong information almost always comes from an identifiable source.
It names competitors instead of you. Look carefully at what it says about them. It will usually tell you exactly what evidence they have that you do not: reviews mentioning something specific, a mention in a local publication, a professional listing, a clear description of a service.
What to do about each kind of wrong answer
Wrong hours or address. Almost always an out of date listing somewhere. Your Google profile, an old directory entry, a social account nobody updated. Find them and correct them, and check your own website while you are there. Our method is in the citation cleanup guide.
Wrong services. Usually an old page on your own site, or a directory entry from when you did something different. Update or remove the old page rather than leaving it to argue with the new one.
Wrong prices. Either an old page of yours, or the assistant is generalising from your industry because you have never published anything about pricing. Publishing how your pricing works, even as a range or an explanation of what affects it, is the fix.
Nothing at all. This is the discovery problem, and the answer is to become documented in places that are not your own website: your professional body, well established directories, local coverage, supplier and manufacturer listings, and reviews that contain useful sentences. We set the whole approach out in how to get named when somebody asks for a recommendation.
The thing you cannot do
There is no form to fill in to correct an assistant. No support address that will fix your entry. No advertising slot in that answer to buy.
The only lever is the underlying material. Assistants read what exists about you across the web and summarise it. Change what exists, and the answer changes, though not immediately, because sources refresh at their own pace.
This is frustrating and it is also, in a way, fair. It means the businesses being described well are the ones with a genuinely accurate, well documented presence, rather than the ones with the largest advertising budget.
Make it a routine, not a project
Put it in the diary for every few months, and immediately after anything changes: a new address, a new phone number, a new service, a change in ownership or a rebrand.
Keep the dated notes. The comparison over time is more useful than any single check, because you will see whether your work is changing the answer.
If you would rather have the whole picture assembled for you, our free visibility check looks at how both search engines and AI assistants currently see your business and reports back in plain language.
But do run the eight questions yourself, at least once. There is something clarifying about reading a stranger's description of your own business, written by a machine, from evidence you did not choose. Most owners find at least one thing they need to correct before the end of the week.