Our story
I've been running SEO campaigns for small businesses since 2018. In late 2024, I noticed something unsettling: AI was consistently recommending my clients' competitors — even when my clients had better reviews, better websites, and years more experience.
When a potential client in Barrie asked me to explain why ChatGPT was recommending a competitor with 40 fewer Google reviews, I couldn't give a clean answer. I knew the general principles — structured data, citations, content signals — but I had no reliable way to measure any of it.
I started doing manual AI visibility checks by hand: writing buyer-intent queries, running them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview, and tracking whether my clients showed up. It was tedious. And it was eye-opening.
"73% of the small businesses I tested were completely invisible to AI — including some with 200+ Google reviews and page-one Google rankings. The old signals weren't enough."
So I automated the process. CheckAIListing uses DataForSEO's live AI query API to simulate the exact searches your potential customers are running — and measures whether AI recommends your business or someone else's.
There's a lot of noise in the "AI SEO" space right now. Most tools are either checking static rankings (which aren't how AI works) or running vague audits without showing you the actual query results. We do something different.
GPT-4o-mini with web search enabled
Real-time web search + AI synthesis
AI Overview citation signals
We send buyer-intent queries — "best plumber in [your city]", "who do I call for HVAC near me" — and measure whether your business name appears in the AI's response. We also capture which competitors are being recommended, so you know exactly who you're up against and why.
We're not a big agency with a team of 50. We're not selling a $2,000/month retainer. We're not going to bury your results behind a paywall and then upsell you into oblivion.
CheckAIListing is a focused tool for a focused problem: are customers finding you in AI, or are they finding your competitors? The free check gives you a real answer in real time. The paid options give you more depth, more platforms, and more consistency over time.
If you have questions about your results or want to talk through what to do with them, send an email. I read everything.
AI recommendations are probabilistic — the same query can return slightly different results on different days, and what "appears" in a response depends on which version of the model ran, which web results it pulled, and a dozen other variables. Our checks reflect real conditions at the time of the query, but they're a snapshot, not a permanent truth.
That's part of why the monitoring plan exists. Visibility shifts. The businesses that stay on top of it will have a meaningful advantage over the ones that check once and assume nothing changed.
Free check, real data, plain-English results. Takes 30 seconds to submit.
Run My Free AI Visibility Check →