How to Check (and Fix) How AI Tools Describe Your Business

By Arya

AI assistants are already telling potential customers about your business. Here's how to find out what they're saying — and how to shape the narrative before it shapes you.

How to Check (and Fix) How AI Tools Describe Your Business

How to Check (and Fix) How AI Tools Describe Your Business

A friend of mine owns a bakery in Austin. She's been in business for nine years, has a loyal following, and gets consistent five-star reviews. Last month, someone walked in and said, "I asked ChatGPT for the best bakeries in Austin, and it didn't mention you at all."

She laughed it off. Then she went home and tried it herself. Not only was her bakery missing from the recommendations — one of the businesses that was listed had closed six months ago.

Welcome to the new reality of search. AI assistants like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are increasingly where people go to ask, "What's the best _____ near me?" And unlike traditional search results, you can't just look at a rankings page to see where you stand. The AI gives a conversational answer, often without explaining where it got its information — and you have almost no visibility into what it's telling people about you.

That's a problem. But it's also a solvable one.

This guide walks you through exactly how to audit what AI tools are saying about your business, why they might be getting it wrong, and the concrete steps you can take to improve your AI search visibility as a small business.

Why This Matters Right Now

Let's be honest: most small business owners are still focused on Google rankings, and that makes sense. Google isn't going anywhere. But the way people interact with Google is already changing.

Google's AI Overviews — those AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results — are now showing up for a growing percentage of queries. Meanwhile, millions of people are asking ChatGPT and Gemini questions they used to type into a search bar: "best accountant in Denver," "affordable wedding photographer near me," "who fixes German cars in Portland."

Here's what makes this different from traditional SEO: when someone Googles your business, they see a list of links and can click through to your website. When someone asks an AI assistant, they get a direct answer. If your business isn't part of that answer — or worse, if the AI describes you inaccurately — you never even get the chance to make your case.

Durable, a company that builds AI-powered websites for small businesses, recently launched a Discoverability dashboard specifically designed to track how AI tools describe businesses. It's one of the first tools built for this exact problem, and it signals something important: AI search visibility for small business is becoming its own discipline. Not a subset of SEO. Not a nice-to-have. A real thing you need to pay attention to.

The good news? You don't need to wait for a fancy dashboard to start. You can audit your AI presence right now, today, with nothing more than a browser and some well-crafted prompts.

Step 1: Find Out What AI Tools Are Actually Saying About You

Before you can fix anything, you need to know what you're working with. This is the audit phase, and it's simpler than you might think.

How to Manually Check Your AI Visibility

Open up the AI assistants your customers are most likely using. For most businesses, that means ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. If your audience skews younger or more tech-savvy, you might also check Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot.

Then, ask them the kinds of questions your ideal customer would ask. Not questions about your business specifically — questions about your category in your location.

Here are prompts you can copy and paste, replacing the brackets with your own details:

Prompt 1 — Category recommendation:

What are the best [your business type] in [your city or neighborhood]? I'm looking for [specific quality your customers care about, e.g., "someone who works with small businesses" or "a family-friendly option"].

Prompt 2 — Direct business inquiry:

What can you tell me about [your exact business name] in [your city]? Are they reputable? What do customers say about them?

Prompt 3 — Comparison query:

I'm trying to decide between a few [your business type] in [your city]. What should I consider, and who would you recommend?

Prompt 4 — Problem-based query:

I need help with [specific problem your business solves] in [your city]. Who should I call?

Run each of these across at least two AI platforms. Copy the responses into a document. You're looking for three things:

  1. Are you mentioned at all? If not, that tells you something important about your digital footprint.
  2. Is the information accurate? Check business hours, location, services offered, pricing ranges — anything the AI states as fact.
  3. What's the tone? Does the AI describe you enthusiastically, neutrally, or with caveats? Does it mention specific strengths or just give a generic blurb?

Do this once, and you'll have a baseline. Do it monthly, and you'll start to see how changes you make affect your AI representation.

Using Durable's Discoverability Dashboard

If you want to automate this process, Durable's new Discoverability dashboard is designed to do exactly that. According to reporting from The Useful Daily, the tool tracks how major AI assistants describe your business over time, giving you a centralized view of your AI-generated reputation.

The advantage of a dedicated tool is consistency. Manual prompting gives you a snapshot, but AI responses can vary depending on when you ask, how you phrase the question, and even which version of the model is running that day. A tracking dashboard smooths out that noise and shows you trends.

That said, don't skip the manual step. Running your own prompts teaches you how these tools think about your business in a way that no dashboard can replicate. You'll notice patterns — maybe the AI always mentions your competitors but not you, or maybe it gets your specialty wrong every time. Those patterns are gold.

Step 2: Understand Why AI Might Be Getting It Wrong

If the AI doesn't mention your business, or describes it inaccurately, it's tempting to think the system is broken. It's not broken — it's just working with incomplete information.

AI assistants build their understanding of your business from publicly available data. That includes:

If any of these sources are outdated, inconsistent, or missing, the AI has less to work with. And when an AI doesn't have strong data about a specific business, it does what any reasonable system would do: it recommends businesses it does have strong data about.

This is why a restaurant with 2,000 Google reviews and an active blog gets recommended, while an equally good restaurant with 40 reviews and a website last updated in 2021 doesn't. It's not a quality judgment. It's a data availability problem.

Step 3: Fix Your Foundation — The Stuff That Actually Moves the Needle

Now for the practical part. Here's what to do, in order of impact.

Clean Up Your Business Information Everywhere

This sounds boring. It is boring. It's also the single most effective thing you can do.

Go through every platform where your business is listed — Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, industry directories — and make sure the following are identical everywhere:

Inconsistency confuses AI systems. If your Google listing says you're a "digital marketing agency" and your website says you're a "growth marketing consultancy" and Yelp says you're an "advertising firm," the AI has to guess which one is right. Sometimes it guesses wrong. Sometimes it just moves on to a business with cleaner data.

This is called NAP consistency (Name, Address, Phone) in the SEO world, and it's been important for local search for years. It's even more important for AI search because these models are synthesizing information from multiple sources simultaneously.

Rewrite Your Website Content for Clarity and Specificity

Most small business websites are written for humans who already know what the business does. That's a problem when an AI is trying to figure you out from scratch.

Look at your homepage and service pages. Do they clearly state:

A homepage that says "We bring your vision to life" tells an AI nothing. A homepage that says "We're a residential interior design studio in Nashville, specializing in kitchen and bathroom renovations for homes built before 1960" tells it everything.

Be specific. Be literal. Save the poetic branding language for your Instagram. Your website needs to communicate facts clearly enough that a machine can parse them — and a human can understand them in five seconds.

This is also where an AI writing assistant can be genuinely useful. If staring at a blank page and rewriting your service descriptions feels overwhelming, use AI to draft clear, specific versions of your existing content. You'll still want to edit for accuracy and voice, but getting a solid first draft in minutes instead of hours removes the biggest barrier to actually doing this work.

Add Structured Data to Your Website

Structured data (also called schema markup) is a bit of code added to your website that explicitly tells search engines and AI tools key facts about your business. Think of it as a cheat sheet you're handing directly to the machines.

You don't need to be a developer to add it. If you use WordPress, plugins like Yoast or Rank Math can generate structured data for you. If you use Squarespace or Wix, basic business schema is often built in — you just need to fill in the fields completely.

At minimum, make sure your site includes LocalBusiness schema with:

This won't guarantee you show up in AI recommendations, but it removes ambiguity. You're making it as easy as possible for AI systems to understand exactly what you are and where you operate.

Build Your Citation and Mention Footprint

Here's something most small business owners overlook: AI tools don't just read your website. They read about you across the entire internet.

Every time your business is mentioned on another website — a local news article, a "best of" list, a blog post, a chamber of commerce directory, a podcast show notes page — that's a citation. And citations are one of the strongest signals AI tools use to determine which businesses are notable enough to recommend.

Some practical ways to build citations:

The goal isn't to game the system. It's to create a rich, consistent, multi-source picture of your business that AI tools can draw from with confidence.

Step 4: Create Content That Answers the Questions AI Is Fielding

This is where traditional content marketing meets AI visibility, and it's more straightforward than you might expect.

Think about the questions your customers ask you most often. Not the questions you wish they'd ask — the real ones. The ones that come up in every consultation, every phone call, every DM.

Now create content on your website that answers those questions directly.

If you're a plumber and people constantly ask, "How much does it cost to replace a water heater in [your city]?" — write a detailed blog post answering exactly that. Include local pricing ranges, factors that affect cost, and what the process looks like.

Why does this work? Because when someone asks an AI assistant that same question, the AI is looking for authoritative, specific, locally relevant content to draw from. If your blog post is the clearest, most detailed answer available, you've dramatically increased your chances of being cited or recommended.

This is also where having an all-in-one AI tool in your back pocket helps. You can use it to brainstorm the questions your customers are asking, draft outlines for FAQ-style content, and even generate supporting visuals for your blog posts — all without switching between five different apps.

A few content ideas that tend to perform well for AI visibility:

What Most People Get Wrong

A few common mistakes I see small business owners make when they first start thinking about AI search visibility:

Mistake 1: Asking AI about themselves and panicking. You ask ChatGPT about your business, it gives a vague or slightly wrong answer, and you assume the sky is falling. Remember — AI responses vary. Ask the same question five times and you might get five different answers. Look for patterns across multiple queries and platforms before drawing conclusions.

Mistake 2: Trying to "hack" the AI. There's no meta tag you can add that says "Dear ChatGPT, please recommend me." This isn't like buying Google ads. The way to influence AI recommendations is to build a genuine, well-documented, widely-cited online presence. There are no shortcuts.

Mistake 3: Ignoring this because it feels too new. Yes, AI search is still evolving. But the businesses that start optimizing now will have a compounding advantage over those that wait. Everything you do to improve your AI visibility — cleaning up listings, creating better content, building citations — also improves your traditional SEO. There's no downside.

Mistake 4: Focusing only on one AI platform. ChatGPT and Gemini pull from different data sources and use different models. A strategy that works for one might not work for the other. Audit across multiple platforms and build a broad digital presence rather than trying to optimize for a single tool.

Mistake 5: Forgetting to re-check. AI models are updated regularly. What they say about your business in January might be completely different by April. Build a quarterly audit into your routine — or use a tool like Durable's dashboard to track changes automatically.

Your 10-Minute Quick Start

If you've read this far and feel overwhelmed, here's what to do in the next 10 minutes:

  1. Open ChatGPT (or any AI assistant you have access to).
  2. Type: "What are the best [your business type] in [your city]?" and hit enter.
  3. Then type: "What can you tell me about [your business name] in [your city]?"
  4. Copy both responses into a note.
  5. Check your Google Business Profile. Is every field filled out? Is the information current? Update anything that's outdated.

That's it. You now know more about your AI visibility than 95% of small business owners. Everything else in this guide is about building on that foundation.

Why Consolidating Your AI Tools Matters Here

One thing I've noticed working with small business owners: the ones who actually follow through on this stuff are the ones who've simplified their toolkit. When you need one app to write content, another to generate images for your blog, another to create a quick video for social media, and another to handle everything else — most people just... don't do it.

That's part of why tools like Gab AI exist. When you can create text, images, videos, music, and more from a single dashboard, the friction drops dramatically. Rewriting your service page descriptions, creating a header image for a new blog post, and drafting a social media video to promote it all happens in one place. It sounds like a small thing, but reducing tool-switching is often the difference between "I should update my website" and actually doing it.

The Bigger Picture

AI search visibility for small business isn't a fad, and it's not going to replace traditional SEO overnight. But it is a new layer of discovery that's growing fast. The businesses that pay attention to it now — that audit their AI presence, clean up their data, create clear and specific content, and build a strong citation footprint — are going to have a meaningful edge in 12 to 18 months.

The best part? None of this requires a huge budget or technical expertise. It requires attention, consistency, and a willingness to see your business the way a machine sees it — then fill in the gaps.

Your customers are already asking AI for recommendations. The only question is whether your business is part of the answer.

Start creating the content, images, and videos your business needs to stay visible — all in one place at https://gab.ai.