Check what AI already says about you before you change anything
Before you rewrite a single page, spend 30 minutes finding out where you stand. You need a baseline, otherwise in three months you won't know whether anything you did made a difference. All you need is a laptop, a spreadsheet and a cup of tea.
The 30 minute manual audit
Write down 10 questions a real customer would ask, in their words rather than yours. Mix the types. A few should be "find me someone" questions, such as best web designer in Sussex for a small trade business. A few should be price or advice questions, such as how much does an electrician charge in Brighton. One or two should be about you by name, such as is [your business] any good?
A balanced list of 10 usually looks like this:
- Three discovery questions: "who is the best [service] in [town]?"
- Two comparison questions: "[you] vs [local competitor]", or "should I use a local [service] or a national company?"
- Two price questions: "how much does [service] cost in [county]?"
- Two trust questions: "is it worth paying for [service]?" or "what should I check before hiring a [trade]?"
- One brand question: "is [your business] reliable?"
Always include the town or county, because people searching for local services nearly always do, and the engines respond very differently with and without a place name.
Put each question into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode. That is 40 answers, which sounds like a lot, but it goes quickly once you get into a rhythm. Two practical points. In ChatGPT, make sure the search option is switched on, because otherwise you are only seeing what the model remembers from training and not what it finds live. Both matter, but live search is where your recent work will show up first. And Google AI Mode is now available to UK users, but you may need to select the AI Mode tab under the search bar, so check you are actually in it and not looking at a standard results page.
What to record
Set up a simple spreadsheet with one row per prompt per engine. Add columns for:
- Were you mentioned (yes or no)?
- Position: first recommendation, one of several, or buried at the bottom?
- Which competitors appeared?
- Which sources were cited (directories, review sites, news, your own pages)?
- Was anything about you wrong, such as old prices, the wrong town or services you don't offer?
The cited sources column is the most useful one. It tells you exactly which websites the engines trust for your market, and that becomes your to-do list later.
Run it more than once
AI answers are not fixed like a ranking position. Ask the same question twice and you can get a different list. So run each prompt at least twice, ideally on different days, and use a logged-out or private window so your own search history doesn't flatter the result. If you appear in one run out of three, record it as one out of three, not as a win.
Where Scrunch and Peec AI fit
Tools like Scrunch and Peec AI automate exactly this job. They run your prompts on a schedule across several engines and report share of voice, meaning how often you appear compared with competitors. That is handy, but it costs money every month, and prices vary widely depending on how many prompts and engines you track, so check their current pricing pages rather than trusting any figure you read in an article. Only consider one once your manual audit shows that AI answers are genuinely influencing your sales, for example if customers mention ChatGPT when they ring you.
When you do compare tools, ask three practical questions. Can you enter your own prompts, including local ones with a town name? Does it show which sources were cited, not just whether you were mentioned? And can you export the data so you aren't locked in? A tool that only gives you a single visibility score will tell you very little you can act on.
Turn it into a baseline
Pick three numbers and write them at the top of your sheet:
- Mention rate: the percentage of answers that name you.
- Citation rate: the percentage that link to or cite your own website.
- Accuracy: a score out of 10 for how correctly they describe you.
Here is how it looks with real numbers. Imagine you run a boiler servicing firm in Worthing. You ask 10 questions on four engines, twice each, which gives 80 answers. You are named in 18 of them, so your mention rate is 18 divided by 80, or 22.5%. Your own website is linked in 6, so your citation rate is 7.5%. One engine claims you cover Chichester, which you don't, and another quotes a call-out fee from 2021, so you score yourself 6 out of 10 for accuracy.
Now look at the sources column. Checkatrade appears 31 times, Yell 12, a local Facebook group 5 and your own site 6. That tells you something no ranking report would: the engines lean heavily on Checkatrade for your trade in your area, so a thin or outdated Checkatrade profile is costing you more than any page on your own site. Fix that first.
Put a reminder in your diary to repeat the audit on the same day each month.
Spot AI visitors in your analytics
The audit shows what the engines say. Analytics shows whether anyone is clicking. In Google Analytics 4, go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and look at the source column for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com. Set the report to a 90 day range, as the numbers are small enough to be lumpy week to week.
Expect modest figures. A site with 2,000 visits a month might see a few dozen from AI tools, and traffic from Google AI Mode generally gets lumped in with ordinary Google traffic, so you can't separate it. Don't judge success on clicks alone, because many people read an AI answer, remember your name and search for you directly later. The cheapest fix is a "How did you hear about us?" box on your enquiry form with "ChatGPT or another AI assistant" as an option, and the same question asked on the phone. Ten honest answers will tell you more than a dashboard.
Write pages that an AI can lift an answer from
Answer engines don't read your page like a person. They pull out passages, often a paragraph or two, and stitch them into a response. Your job is to make each passage useful on its own, so it still makes sense when it is lifted out of the page.
Lead with the answer, then expand
Start each section with a direct answer of 40 to 60 words, then add the detail. Take the question How much does a new website cost for a small UK business? A weak page opens with "Every business is different, so it depends on your needs." A page an AI can quote opens like this:
A new website for a small UK business typically costs between £1,500 and £6,000 for a bespoke brochure site, and £4,000 to £15,000 or more for an online shop. The price depends on page count, custom design, features such as bookings or payments, who writes the copy, and ongoing hosting and support.
Use your own real figures, not mine. After that opening, break down what pushes the price up or down, one factor per paragraph.
A quick test: copy any paragraph from your page, paste it into a blank document and read it cold. If it contains "as mentioned above", "this service" with no clue what service, or "we" without saying who, rewrite it so the paragraph names the thing it's talking about. That is exactly the situation an AI faces when it quotes you.
A worked rewrite for a trades page
Here is a typical before and after for a Worthing electrician's "Consumer unit upgrades" page.
Before: "We offer a first class fuse box service at competitive prices. Contact us today to find out how we can help."
After: "Replacing a consumer unit (fuse box) in a typical three bedroom house in West Sussex costs £450 to £750 including parts, testing and an electrical installation certificate. Most jobs take half a day, and the power is off for around four hours. We are NICEIC registered and cover Worthing, Littlehampton, Shoreham and Brighton."
The second version contains a price range, a unit of work, a timescale, a disruption detail, a credential and a service area. Each of those is something an AI can quote when someone asks "how much to replace a fuse box in Worthing?" The first version contains nothing it can use. If you are nervous about publishing prices, a range with a clear "from" and a sentence on what affects it is enough. Engines tend to prefer a business that gives a straight number over one that hides it, and so do customers.
Write headings the way customers talk
Use question-style H2 and H3 headings that mirror real speech: "How long does a website take to build?" beats "Our Timeline". Keep to one idea per paragraph, so no single passage depends on the one before it to make sense.
Put the specifics in
Vague copy is not worth citing. "Competitive prices and fast turnaround" tells a model nothing. "Five-page sites from £X, live in 3 to 4 weeks, covering Worthing, Brighton and across West Sussex, with a 30 day fix-it guarantee" gives it facts to repeat. Prices, timescales, areas covered, process steps and guarantees are what get quoted.
Comparison content is another place specifics win. People ask engines "X or Y?" questions all the time: a bespoke site or a template, a new boiler or a repair, a monthly retainer or pay as you go. A page that fairly sets out when each option makes sense, with real costs and trade-offs, is far more likely to be used than one that simply tells people to buy your preferred option.
Build FAQ blocks from real questions
Add a short FAQ to each service page, using questions you actually hear. Check your phone notes and email inbox, then search your main service on Google and note the People Also Ask boxes. Answer each in two or three plain sentences.
Three things people get wrong here. First, they copy the same ten generic questions onto every page, which gives the engines nothing distinctive. Each page's FAQ should reflect that service. Second, they write the questions the way a marketer would ("Why choose us?") instead of the way a customer would ("Do you clean up afterwards?"). Third, they add FAQ schema to questions that aren't visible on the page. Google has limited how often it shows FAQ rich results in search, but the markup is still harmless for machines as long as every question and answer appears in the visible text.
Keep answers readable and fresh
Don't hide key answers behind tabs, accordions that load on click, pop-ups, PDFs or images of text, because retrieval systems may not read them. Put them in normal HTML on the page.
The same goes for anything that only appears once JavaScript runs. Many AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript the way a browser does, so a price table built by a script may be invisible to them. A quick check: right click your page, choose View page source, and search for a sentence from the page. If it isn't in the source, a crawler may not see it either, and your developer should look at server-side rendering.
Finally, add a visible "Last updated: May 2025" line (with the real date) to key pages, and genuinely review them every quarter. Update prices and examples when you do, so the date is honest.
Don't mass produce location pages
The temptation with local AI visibility is to clone one page 40 times with a different town name each time. It rarely works, and thin near-duplicate pages can drag down the rest of your site. Create a dedicated page only where you have something genuinely different to say: a real job you did there, a local regulation, a named customer who agreed to be quoted, or a different price because of travel time. For everywhere else, list the towns you cover on one solid service area page.
Make your business unmistakable as an entity: markup, profiles and consistent facts
An "entity" is simply a clearly identified thing: your business, as distinct from every other business with a similar name. The test is whether an AI could state, in one sentence, who you are, what you sell, where you work and who vouches for you. For example: "Samson Web Design is a Worthing-based web design agency, trading since 2006, building websites for UK small businesses." If your online footprint can't support a sentence like that, fix it.
Add structured data
Schema markup is code that labels your facts for machines. Ask your developer to add it in JSON-LD format, covering:
- Organization or LocalBusiness on your homepage and contact page
- Service on each service page
- FAQPage where you have FAQ blocks
- Review for genuine customer reviews shown on the page
- Person for named authors and team members
On the homepage, the fields that matter most are your legal or trading name, website address, logo, founding date, telephone number, full postal address, the areas you serve, and a sameAs list. The sameAs field is the one most sites miss. It lists the web addresses of your other official profiles, such as your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn page, Facebook page, Trustpilot listing and Companies House entry, and it tells machines that all of these are the same business.
Test it with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator before you publish, as one stray comma can break the lot. Also make sure the markup matches what's visible. If your schema says you're open until 6pm and your contact page says 5pm, you've created exactly the kind of contradiction that makes engines less sure of you.
Complete your business profiles
Fill in Google Business Profile fully: categories, services, opening hours, service areas, photos and a proper description. Then claim Bing Places, which feeds Microsoft Copilot and parts of ChatGPT search, and Apple Business Connect. Most small firms stop at Google and leave the other two blank.
On Google, choose a precise primary category ("Boiler repair service" rather than just "Plumber") and add secondary ones, then list each service with a one or two sentence description and a price where you can. Use the Q&A and posts features sparingly but accurately. Bing Places can import directly from your Google profile, so the whole job often takes under 20 minutes, which makes it one of the best returns on time in this guide.
Keep your facts identical everywhere
Check your name, address, phone number and service descriptions across Companies House, Yell, Checkatrade, Trustpilot, LinkedIn and your own About page. "Ltd" in one place and not another, or an old office address on one directory, makes the engines less sure they're looking at one business. Make a one-page master copy of your details and paste from it every time.
The cost of getting this wrong is real. A firm that moved from a Worthing unit to a home office but never updated Yell may find an AI assistant still telling customers to visit the old address, or quoting a phone number that now goes to a stranger. Searching your phone number in quotation marks on Google is a fast way to find old listings you'd forgotten about.
Show the people behind it
Build a proper About page and author bios with names, photos, qualifications and years of experience. Statements like "trading since 2006" give models something concrete to repeat, and they reassure human visitors too. Link each bio to the person's LinkedIn profile and any professional body listing, so there is a trail of evidence that this is a real person with real credentials.
Don't block the crawlers
None of this works if bots can't get in. Pages need to be crawlable, quick to load and mobile friendly. As one industry write-up puts it, without strong SEO there is no AEO, because an AI can't read what it can't find. Open yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt and check that GPTBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended aren't blocked, unless you've deliberately chosen that. Some security plugins and hosts block them by default, so it's worth a two minute look.
It helps to know what each one does, because blocking the wrong one has different consequences:
- OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT's search results. Block it and you're less likely to be shown there.
- ChatGPT-User visits a page when someone asks ChatGPT to look at it.
- GPTBot collects material for training OpenAI's models. Blocking it is a legitimate choice about training, and doesn't remove you from ChatGPT search.
- PerplexityBot indexes pages for Perplexity's answers.
- Google-Extended controls whether your content is used for Gemini training. It does not affect normal Google Search, and AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the ordinary Googlebot, so blocking Googlebot would remove you from all of it.
Robots.txt isn't the only gatekeeper. Content delivery and security services such as Cloudflare, and some hosting firewalls, can block AI crawlers with a single setting switched on by default, and your robots.txt file will look perfectly fine while it happens. If your audit shows a particular engine never cites you despite good content, ask your host or developer to check the firewall logs for that crawler's name.
Earn mentions on the sites AI trusts, not just your own
Your own website is only one voice. When an engine decides who to recommend, it leans heavily on what other sites say about you, which is why your audit's cited sources column matters so much. Go back to it now and sort the sources by how often they appeared. The top five are your priority list.
Work through the sources list in order
For each of those top sources, ask one question: can I get a complete, accurate, recent listing or mention here? For a trade business that usually means Checkatrade, Trustpilot, Yell, MyBuilder or a trade body directory. For a professional services firm it might be Clutch, LinkedIn, or a regional business awards site. Fill every field, upload photos, and make sure the description uses the same wording as your master copy of details. Do one source properly each week rather than ten badly in an afternoon.
Get reviews that say something useful
Engines read the text of reviews, not just the star rating. "Great service" gives them nothing, whereas "They replaced our boiler in Goring in one day and cleaned up afterwards" gives them a service, a place and an outcome. You can't script what customers write, but you can prompt better detail by asking when you request the review, for example: "It would help if you mentioned what we did and which area you're in." Reply to every review, positive or negative, in a couple of sentences that naturally mention the service and town.
Never buy, fake or selectively gather reviews. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, fake and misleading reviews are explicitly banned, and the Competition and Markets Authority can now fine firms directly, with penalties of up to 10% of global turnover. That is a risk no tiny reputational gain is worth.
Get into the roundups and local press
Listicles such as "best web designers in Sussex" or "top 10 plumbers in Brighton" are cited constantly by answer engines, because they conveniently package the very comparison the user asked for. Find the ones that already appear in your audit, and contact the publisher with a short, helpful note and a reason you deserve to be there: years trading, a notable project, accreditations, a clear point of difference. Local news sites, chamber of commerce pages, sponsorship listings for a local football club and supplier case studies all count as independent mentions. Pay for placement only when the page clearly labels it as sponsored and you'd be happy for a customer to see it.
Publish something others will cite
Original information gets quoted because it can't be found anywhere else. You don't need a research department. A short annual price guide based on your last 50 jobs, a survey of 30 of your customers about what worried them most before hiring, or a simple local cost breakdown ticks the box. Give it a clear title, a date, the sample size and a plain summary of findings in the first paragraph, then tell local journalists and industry bloggers it exists.
Join the conversations honestly
Forums, Reddit threads, Facebook groups and Q&A sites often show up in AI answers, especially for "what's it really like" questions. Answer real questions with real, useful detail, say who you are when your answer involves your own business, and never post the same promotional comment repeatedly. If a thread already ranks in your audit and contains bad or outdated information about your sector, a clear, factual reply from a named person at your firm is entirely reasonable.
Avoid the shortcuts
Mass-produced AI-written articles, link swaps with unrelated sites, and hidden text aimed at chatbots are all tempting and all poor value. Search engines have spent two decades learning to spot manufactured signals, and the AI engines build on that same work. One accurate Checkatrade profile with 40 detailed reviews will do more for you than a hundred generic blog posts.
