Plain English, no jargon

Not a promise you will be named. An explanation, a checklist, then a free check.

ChatGPT does not show my business.Here is what it is reading instead.

If you have typed your own business into ChatGPT and watched it name someone else, you are not imagining it. An AI assistant does not know your business the way a person who has driven past your shop does. It builds an answer from what it can read, right at the moment you ask. Here is plainly what that reading looks like, a seven step check you can run yourself, and a free tool that runs the same six questions a buyer near you would ask.

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For any business that gets found locally: contractors, dealers, clinics, shops, restaurants, professional services. English or Spanish sites.

01

How an AI assistant actually answers a local question

No mystery, no black box. Seven plain pieces, in the order they matter.

  1. 01Web search behind the answer. ChatGPT does not already know everything about every local business. For a local buying question, it can run a live web search behind the scenes and read a handful of the pages that search turns up, before it writes you an answer.
  2. 02Pages that answer the exact question. Among those pages, the ones that plainly answer the question as it was asked tend to get read and quoted. A homepage that only lists services in general does not answer a specific question the way a page written for that exact question does.
  3. 03Directories and review sites. Directories and review sites already hold many businesses, answering many questions, in one consistent place. That makes them an easy, frequent source for the assistant to quote, sometimes ahead of any single business's own site.
  4. 04Structured business data. Some pages carry business details in a format a program can read directly, not just a paragraph a person reads: the name, address, phone, hours and service area marked up as LocalBusiness or Service data, the kind schema.org defines. Where that data exists, the assistant does not have to guess it out of prose.
  5. 05llms.txt. A plain text file some sites publish at yoursite.com/llms.txt. It tells an AI tool plainly what the business is and points to the pages that matter, the way a sitemap points a search engine to what exists.
  6. 06Crawler access through robots.txt. Every site has, or should have, a file at yoursite.com/robots.txt that names which automated crawlers are allowed to read it. If that file blocks a crawler by name, such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended or Bingbot, that crawler cannot read anything on the site, so nothing on it can inform that tool's answer.
  7. 07Bing's index, for ChatGPT search. When ChatGPT search answers a question, it draws on Bing's index as well as its own crawler. A site Bing has not indexed is missing from that path too, no matter how good the page itself is.
02

Seven steps you can do alone, today

No account, no tool, no budget. Just your own site and a browser.

  1. 01
    Read your own home page like a buyer typing a question.

    Look for one page that plainly answers "who does what you do, in your city," not a homepage that just lists services in general terms.

  2. 02
    Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser and read every line.

    Look for a "Disallow" rule next to GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended or Bingbot. Any of those blocked means that crawler cannot read your site at all.

  3. 03
    Open yoursite.com/llms.txt.

    If nothing loads, you do not have one yet. It is a plain text file, not a project, so it does not need to be elaborate to exist.

  4. 04
    View the page source of your home page and search it for "schema.org" or "LocalBusiness."

    That is the structured business data an assistant can read directly, instead of guessing your name, address, phone and service area out of paragraphs.

  5. 05
    Search your own business name and city, and open the directories and review sites you already know you are on.

    Confirm your name, address and phone match your website exactly, everywhere they appear.

  6. 06
    Open your Google Business Profile.

    Confirm it is claimed, current, and matches your website.

  7. 07
    Check whether Bing has indexed your site.

    Search site:yourdomain.com on Bing, or sign into Bing Webmaster Tools. ChatGPT search draws on Bing's index, so a site Bing has not indexed is missing on that path too, regardless of how good the site is.

See your own six answers

You can run every step above by hand. Or paste your website at the free check, and we do it in front of you: we read your public home page, robots.txt and llms.txt, write the six questions a buyer near you would actually type, ask each one with live web search, and show you whether you were named, who was named instead, which directories were quoted, and what to fix first.

Run the free check
Reads
Your public home page, robots.txt and llms.txt
Asks
Six buyer questions, with live web search
Time
20 to 45 seconds
Limit
3 checks per address per day, 100 per day site-wide
Cost
Free, no sign in