With a browser and a terminal, you can check in about thirty minutes whether AI engines can find your business and whether they recommend it. Ask five money questions in three engines, check robots.txt and llms.txt, fetch a page the way GPTBot does, look for schema in the page source, and review your Google Business Profile. Each step below has its own time budget.
Minutes 0–10: Ask five money questions in three engines
Write down five questions a ready-to-spend customer would ask. Skip your brand name and use category questions, where an assistant has to choose whom to recommend: "best [your trade] in [your town]," "how much does [your core service] cost near [your area]," "who can fix [urgent problem] today."
Ask all five in ChatGPT (with web search on), Perplexity, and Google. In Google, watch for AI Overviews or use AI Mode. For each of the fifteen answers, jot three things: were you mentioned, were you linked, and who was recommended instead. Read the competitors' wins closely. The sources engines cite for them (directories, review platforms, service pages) show where visibility comes from in your market. Of the five steps, this one most often turns up something you didn't expect.
Minutes 10–15: Check robots.txt and llms.txt
Load yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. You're scanning for explicit blocks on AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) and for a blanket "Disallow: /" that someone left behind after a redesign. Either can quietly remove you from AI answers regardless of how good the site is.
Then try yourdomain.com/llms.txt. Most sites won't have one, and that's not an emergency. It's a proposed standard: a short, curated summary of your site written for AI readers. If adding one later takes under an hour, it's worth doing. Today, just note whether it exists.
Minutes 15–20: Fetch your homepage as GPTBot
This step catches the quiet blockers. In a terminal, request your homepage with GPTBot's user agent using curl, and look at two things: the status code and the content. A 403 or a "verify your browser" page means a firewall or CDN is blocking AI crawlers, often through a default setting nobody at your business chose. A 200 whose body doesn't contain your real text (search the output for your phone number) means your content is rendered by JavaScript that AI crawlers never execute.
Without a terminal you can get a rougher answer: right-click your homepage, choose "View page source," and search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it's missing from the source, most AI crawlers can't see it either.
Minutes 20–25: View source for schema
While you're in the page source, search for "application/ld+json." You're hoping to find structured data, ideally LocalBusiness or a more specific type, listing your name, address, phone, hours, and service area. Those values should match what the page displays. Schema is machine-readable confirmation of facts the engines are otherwise left to infer, and it serves your classic SEO and your AI visibility at the same time. If there's none, or it shows a stale address from two offices ago, put it on the fix list.
Minutes 25–30: Google Business Profile once-over
AI answers about local businesses rely heavily on local listings and profile data, and your Google Business Profile is the most important piece of that. Spend the last five minutes as a skeptical stranger: is the primary category right and specific? Hours current, including holidays? Phone and website correct? Are recent reviews getting responses? Any user-suggested edits pending that you never approved? A neglected profile undermines everything else, because it's often the most authoritative source engines have about you. The profile work you'd do for local SEO is the same work that helps AI visibility.
What can't a DIY audit tell you?
This is a snapshot, and AI answers are probabilistic. The answer you got today isn't guaranteed tomorrow, and five questions in three engines is only a small sample. A DIY pass can't tell you your share of voice against competitors across the hundreds of question variants customers use. It can't watch for the regression when a plugin update quietly reinstates a crawler block in October, and it can't tell you whether the fixes you make move citations over the following months. Continuous monitoring, as opposed to a Saturday-morning checkup, is what a platform like Speak Local is for.
The limits aren't a reason to skip the thirty minutes. Most local businesses have never checked even this much, so doing it puts you ahead. You'll come away with a list of what's broken or missing and which competitors the engines recommend in your place.
