Introduction

You don’t know what AI is saying about your business. Your buyers have started asking AI the questions they used to type into Google. Who should I hire for this? What should I buy? How do I deal with this problem? For many buyers, the answer AI gives them is the whole search.

AI search means asking an AI tool a question and getting a direct answer based on information it can find online. Instead of giving you a list of search results to work through, the AI gives you an answer and may cite the websites or pages it used.

There's no ranking to check, and no directory AI looks you up in. You can keep working on your website without knowing whether AI reads it, what it says about you, or which pages it cites instead.

Instead of leaving everything to guesswork, you can find out where you stand in AI search in this one workshop session, using two free AI tools and pages you’ve already published.

AI builds its answers only from pages it can find. You’ll test two kinds of questions in this workshop.

• A name question comes from someone who already knows your business name and wants to check you out. AI builds that answer from three places: your own website, listings and profiles you can edit, and pages other people published. You’ll sort every source you find into one of those three.
• A problem question comes from someone who doesn’t know your business and asks about a problem you solve. For that question, your content competes with every page AI can find on the topic. Some questions get answered without any sources listed. This workshop works with questions where AI cites pages, because those are the pages you can compare with your own. When AI cites a page, it names that page as a source for its answer and usually links to it.

You'll also use the AI Citability Checklist. Citability is how likely a page is to be cited by AI when someone asks a question it answers. You'll learn the six checklist items in Step 4.

Finding little or nothing about your business is also a result. One example in this guide starts that way, and Step 3 shows you what to do when AI has almost nothing to work with.

Meet Nadia and Omar

You'll follow two business examples through this workshop.

Nadia runs Fairlight Bookkeeping, a firm with four employees and six years in business. She serves local small businesses and some online clients. Her inquiries have dropped for two years, and when she runs her name question, AI turns up information that is accurate in places but incomplete or out of date in others.

Omar owns Harbor Office Co., which sells home office and ergonomics gear, including laptop risers, monitor stands, and desk accessories. The company sells through a marketplace and its own online store, and Omar also publishes setup guides. His customers can buy from anywhere, so location never goes into his questions. When he runs his name question, AI finds almost nothing and names competitors instead.

Before You Start

Pick two AI chat tools to use for the whole workshop, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Perplexity. Free accounts work. Two tools give you two sets of sources, and the differences between their answers are part of what you'll record.

Throughout this workshop, a clean chat refers to a conversation where the AI isn’t using saved memory or information from earlier chats. Use a temporary chat, switch off memory, or sign out, whichever your tool offers.

So follow two rules for every test in this workshop:

• Don't tell AI the business is yours
• Don't paste your web address. Breaking either one of those rules changes the answer you get, and you want the answer a stranger would get.

If you're new to AI chat tools, start with the free AI Foundations course for the basics.

What You’ll Have by the End of the Workshop

You’ll walk away with:

• The answer a buyer gets when they ask AI about your business, and the list of websites AI built it from
• A ranked list of the questions your buyers ask AI, in their words, so you know which one to work on first
• A side-by-side record of what two AI tools say about your business and which pages they cite on your topic
• A buyer question that your existing page has a realistic chance of being cited for
• Wrong or out-of-date information corrected where you can fix it today, with deadlines for anything that has to wait
• A completed Comparison Grid showing what the cited pages do and where your page falls short
• A dated set of content changes for your page, and a re-test date that tells you whether they worked

Action Steps:

• Choose the two AI tools you'll use throughout this workshop.
• In a clean chat, ask one of your AI tools a broad name question about your business: “What can you tell me about [your business name]?” Then ask which websites it used.
• Note how much of the answer is right, what is wrong or missing, and where the information came from.