When someone asks AI for the best business like yours, does it say your name?
People have started asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI for recommendations instead of scrolling through search results. Those answers name a handful of businesses. I find out whether you’re one of them, why not, and what to do about it.
The traffic didn’t move. It stopped arriving.
In a 2026 survey of more than 300 small and medium businesses run by LocaliQ, 40% reported losing traffic to Google algorithm changes and the rise of AI in search — rising to 46% among businesses with 11 to 100 staff. Half said they were already monitoring referrals coming from AI answer engines.
That’s the shift in one line: someone used to search, scroll, and click through to five sites. Now they ask once and get one answer naming three businesses. If you’re not in the answer, there’s no page two to be on.
The useful part is that this is new. Answer Engine Optimisation barely existed two years ago, which means nobody — no agency, no consultant — has a decade of experience in it. The businesses that sort it out now are early.
What actually gets checked.
Every check below is run against your live site with a purpose-built tool, then read by a human. No guesswork, no generic checklist.
Can AI assistants reach you at all?
Your site is requested as each of the seven crawlers that matter — GPTBot, OAI‑SearchBot, ChatGPT‑User, ClaudeBot, Claude‑SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Google‑Extended — and again as an ordinary browser, so the responses can be compared. That comparison is what catches a soft block: a site that returns a clean 200 to a bot while serving it a fraction of the page. This catches firewall-level blocks that a robots.txt check cannot see, because a site can have a perfectly permissive robots.txt and still return 403 to the bot at the network layer.
Training bots vs answering bots
These are treated differently, because they are different. Blocking bots that scrape for model training is often a deliberate, reasonable business decision. Blocking the bots that fetch your page to answer a live customer question is almost always an accident — and it is the one that costs you work.
Is there anything worth quoting?
Models quote specifics. Pages with concrete statistics get cited noticeably more often than pages of adjectives, and pages that cite their own sources do better again. Your copy is scored for figures, sources, answer-shaped sections, tables and structure — the things that make a page easy to lift a clean answer from.
Everything that isn’t your website
For a local business this is the bigger half, and it’s the part most people selling “AI visibility” skip. Google Business Profile completeness, review rating and recency, category accuracy, and whether your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear.
If your website isn’t the problem, I’ll tell you that — and charge you less.— the whole reason this service is worth buying from a web designer
Two things most people in this field won’t tell you.
Schema markup is oversold
It is the standard pitch for AI visibility work. But a controlled test by Ahrefs across 1,885 pages found adding JSON‑LD schema produced no statistically significant change in AI citations — −4.6% on Google AI Overviews, +2.4% on AI Mode, +2.2% on ChatGPT. Pages with schema do get cited more, but that is because sites investing in good markup also invest in good content. Remove the confounder and the effect disappears. Schema is worth having for entity clarity. It is not the fix, and I won’t sell it as one.
For local businesses, your website is the smaller half
Across 2026 local search signal weightings, Google Business Profile accounts for roughly 32% and review signals another 16% — nearly half the picture between them — while on‑page website factors account for about 19%. So if you are a clinic, a trade or a local service business, an audit that only looks at your website is examining under a fifth of what decides the outcome. Mine looks at all of it, and if the honest answer is that your reviews are the constraint rather than your site, that is what the report will say.
AI visibility pricing, published.
These are the prices for this service only — website builds are quoted separately on the pricing page. They’re published because if a business won’t put its prices on its own website, an AI assistant can’t quote them when someone asks what this costs. Same principle I’ll apply to yours.
| Service | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Audit | Written report: your score out of 100, how each of the seven AI crawlers responds to your site, what Google’s AI currently names in your category, and every finding ranked with what to do about it. 2–3 business days. No obligation to go further. | Free first 5, then $89 |
| Fixes | Implementing what the audit found — content restructuring, crawler access, entity and profile work. Quoted against the report, so you know what you’re paying for. | $400–900 |
| Monitoring | Monthly tracking of whether you’re being named, what changed, and what your competitors are doing. Cancel any time. | $99–249/mo |
Building a website with Verde? The audit is included free with the Standard and Premium packages, and 20% off with Starter — $71 instead of $89. See both services side by side →
Before you get in touch.
What does an AI visibility audit cost?
Free for the first 5 businesses, then $89 — and it is priced separately from website builds. Fixes are quoted at $400–900 depending on what the audit finds. Ongoing monitoring is $99–249 per month. There’s no obligation to take the fixes after the audit — plenty of people take the report and do the work themselves.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
No. Traditional SEO optimises for a ranked list of blue links. AI assistants don’t return a list — they return one answer naming a handful of businesses. The signals that get you named are different, and for local businesses most of them aren’t on your website at all.
Will you sell me schema markup?
Only where it genuinely helps. A controlled test across 1,885 pages found schema produced no statistically significant change in AI citations. It’s worth having for entity clarity, but anyone selling it as the fix for AI visibility is overselling it.
What if my website isn’t the problem?
Then the audit says so. For local businesses, Google Business Profile and reviews carry roughly 48% of local search signal weight against about 19% for on‑page website factors. If your rating and review volume are what’s holding you back, I’ll tell you — rather than sell you website work that won’t move the needle.
How long does an audit take?
Two to three business days from payment. You get a written report covering what’s wrong, why it matters, and the order I’d fix it in.