How does AI describe your business?

Search no longer happens only on Google

Many people now ask a question like "swimming lessons for kids in Antalya" not on Google but to an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity. Instead of a list of links, the assistant names a few businesses and writes a couple of sentences about each.

Most business owners have never checked how their business is described in those sentences.

A five-minute test

Two questions to an assistant you use are enough:

1. As a customer: "Where can I go for [what you do] in [your city]?"
2. Directly: "What do you know about [your business name]?"

While reading the answers, check: Are the opening hours and address right? Is a service you no longer offer still listed? Is a competitor recommended while you are not mentioned at all? Sometimes an assistant even names a branch that has closed or an old phone number.

Answers differ between assistants and change over time. Rather than deciding on a single answer, repeating the test with different assistants a few weeks apart gives a more accurate picture.

Where the assistant gets its information

Assistants gather what they know about businesses largely from sources on the web: your website, your Google Business Profile, reviews and your listings in directories. If these sources contradict each other, say one address on the site and another on the profile, the chance of the assistant repeating the wrong one goes up.

So the first step is usually making sure your business name, address, phone number and hours are the same everywhere.

How we handle it

This work is called GEO, generative engine optimisation, and it is part of our SEO and GEO work. The work has two parts: making the business's information consistent across sources, and structuring the site's content so that assistants can read it correctly.

No promise is made that any assistant will recommend you; nobody controls that. What can be controlled is whether the information about you in the sources it reads is correct and consistent.