Ask ChatGPT or any other AI to recommend someone in your line of work and it won't give you twenty options. It gives two or three names. Most people call the first one and stop reading.
Based on reviews and local coverage, here are the ones I'd look at:
An example, not real results. Yours would have real names in it — possibly your competitors.
It does. But go look at Google today. Above the map, above the ads, above the links, there's now a written answer at the top — Google generating a recommendation instead of a list. Most people never scroll past it.
Ten links. You compete for a spot, and the customer picks.
Based on customer reviews and local coverage, three businesses stand out in your area: , and . All three are licensed, insured and offer same-day emergency call-outs.
The answer is written before anyone scrolls. Everything you earned sits below it.
An illustration of the same search, then and now. Names blanked out on purpose — in your audit they are real, and one of them may be a competitor.
60% of U.S. adults have now used AI to look something up — 74% of those under 30.Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, July 2025
Open ChatGPT on your phone. Type this in, filling in your own trade and your own town.
AI isn't making these recommendations up, and it isn't taking money for them. It's reading information about you that's already public and reaching a conclusion. That means the answer can be changed — if you know which piece is causing it.
And sometimes it's worse than being left out — you get named with the wrong phone number, hours you changed two years ago, or a service you stopped offering. A customer who calls a dead number doesn't call back.
I work out the fifteen questions your customers really ask — the plain ones, the urgent ones, the careful ones, and the ones people ask about your business by name.
I put all fifteen to the five places people actually get answers — ChatGPT, Google's answer box, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude — using the free versions, because that's what your customers use. All 75 answers get screenshotted.
You get a short report and thirty minutes on the phone: where you showed up, who got named instead, what they got wrong, and the three to five things to fix in order.
Illustrative layout. Every filled cell in your report links to a dated screenshot.
Not a dashboard you have to log into. A short PDF you can read on your phone between jobs, and hand to whoever runs your website.
One price, one report, no monthly anything. If you want help doing the fixes afterward, that's a separate quote you approve up front — never a retainer that runs forever.
Your numbers, your math. This weighs one job against the cost of the audit. What it earns you after that depends on the fixes you make.
Related, but not the same. Getting found on Google — what the industry calls SEO — is about where you land on a page of links. This is about whether you get named at all when there is no page of links, just one answer. Some fixes help both. But a search-ranking report will not tell you that ChatGPT has been handing out your old phone number for months.
Some will. Ask them what your business looks like in ChatGPT and Google's answer box right now, and see if they can show you. If they can, you don't need me. Most owners find out their marketing company has never checked, because nobody was asking them to.
A short form, eleven questions, filled in whenever suits you. No meeting needed for that part. I fill in most of it myself first from what is already public about you, so usually you are just correcting me. No passwords, no access to your accounts, nothing to install.
Within a week of getting your answers back, usually sooner. Then we spend thirty minutes on the phone going through it together.
Then the report says so, in plain English, instead of inventing problems to justify the fee. You still walk away with a dated record of exactly where you stand today, which is what you measure against next year when you want to know whether anything slipped.
Wrong information — phone numbers, hours, addresses — corrects fairly quickly once fixed at the source. Getting recommended more often takes longer, usually one to three months, because these systems re-read their sources on their own schedule. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
Any repeat audit within a year of your first one is $150. Same fifteen questions, same five assistants, so the two reports line up side by side. AI answers shift on their own schedule, and a re-run is how you find out whether your fixes actually moved anything.
Yes, quoted separately after you've seen the report, and only if you want it. Plenty of owners hand the list to whoever runs their website and it gets done. The report is written so that's possible — it's instructions, not a sales pitch for more work.
I spent ten years running paid advertising for tech companies — a decade of one conversation: your customers can't find you, here's why, here's what it costs you. This is the same conversation. The channel is just new enough that most businesses haven't looked yet. — Mike