What AI actually thinks your business is — and how to find out

A practical guide to running your own informal AI audit — the questions to ask, what the answers reveal, and what to do next.

Start with a simple test

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI search. Type in your company name and ask: "What does [your company] do?"

Then ask: "Which companies would you recommend for [your core service] in [your sector]?"

What you see in response is your current AI Authority. For many established businesses, the results are either sparse, inaccurate, or absent entirely. For others, a competitor they had not considered a serious rival appears prominently — not because they are better, but because AI has more and better information about them.

This is the starting point for understanding why AI Authority matters.

What AI is actually doing

When you ask an AI platform a question about a company or a category, it is not searching the web in real time. It is drawing on a model trained on vast amounts of text — articles, websites, publications, reviews, directories, and structured data — and synthesising a response based on what it has learned to consider credible and authoritative.

The businesses that appear in AI answers tend to share certain characteristics. They have well-structured, substantive content on their own platforms. They are cited and referenced by credible third-party sources — trade publications, industry bodies, review platforms. And they have a consistent, unambiguous identity across every place their name appears.

AI does not reward size or age. It rewards clarity, corroboration, and consistency.

The five questions to run through

If you want to get a clearer picture of your current AI standing, try running through these prompts across at least two or three platforms:

Identity: "What is [your company]? What do they do and who do they serve?"

Category: "Which are the leading companies in [your sector/category]?"

Expertise: "Who are the experts in [your specialist topic]?"

Comparison: "How does [your company] compare to [a key competitor]?"

Recommendation: "If I were looking for [your service], which companies would you recommend?"

Note what comes back. Note what is accurate, what is outdated, what is missing, and what competitors appear that you would not have expected.

What the gaps usually mean

If your company name does not appear in category or recommendation prompts, AI either does not have enough information about you, or the information it has is not structured in a way that allows it to categorise you confidently.

If the information is inaccurate or outdated, AI is drawing on old sources — perhaps a press release from several years ago, or a description that no longer reflects your positioning.

If a competitor appears prominently despite being smaller or less experienced, they have likely done more to establish their AI presence — through content architecture, third-party coverage, or structured data.

What to do with what you find

A self-conducted prompt test gives you a useful directional picture. It will not give you the full story — a proper AI Visibility Audit runs 50 to 100 structured prompts across all major platforms, with baseline scoring, competitive analysis, and a documented roadmap — but it will tell you whether you have a gap worth taking seriously.

If you find you are largely absent, or that what AI says about you is incomplete or inaccurate, the time to address that is now. AI systems are not static. They are updated, refined, and drawn on more heavily with every passing month. The businesses building their AI Authority today are compounding an advantage that will only become harder to close.