AI search visibility
Checking what your website already claims about you
Before adding anything, find out what your site already says about you behind the scenes. On a site that has been through a couple of redesigns and a few plugins, the answer is usually surprising and occasionally embarrassing.
Those hidden labels pile up. A theme adds some, a plugin adds more, an SEO tool adds its own, and none of them clear out what came before. You end up with a page quietly asserting several contradictory things about the same business.
Checking it is not glamorous and it does not take long. It is usually the most valuable hour in this whole area, because nothing you add on top will work while a contradiction sits underneath it.
How to check it yourself
Take five pages: your homepage, a service page, a town page, your contact page and one blog post if you have one. Search for Google Rich Results Test, paste each address in, and read what it lists as found.
Ignore the pass or fail verdict at the top. What you want is the list of things the page claims. Write down what each page says the business is, and look for the same company showing up several different ways.
The four problems we find nearly every time
The same business described separately on every page instead of once. To software building a picture of who you are, that reads as forty similar companies rather than one, and it waters everything down.
Labels for content no longer on the page, usually questions and answers left behind after somebody removed the visible ones in a redesign.
Star ratings with no visible reviews anywhere, which is the one that gets flagged rather than just ignored.
And stale details. An old phone number or a previous address surviving in the labels long after the visible page was corrected, which then feeds an AI answer a number that rings nowhere. That one costs you calls directly and it is completely invisible from the front of the site.
- One set of business details, referred to everywhere else
- Every label matching something a visitor can see on that page
- No star ratings without visible reviews
- Phone, address and hours matching the visible page exactly
- Old questions and answers cleared out after a redesign
The rest of the cluster
| Topic | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Getting named in the answer | A search gives ten names. An AI answer gives two. What decides which two. |
| What GEO really means | Some of what gets sold under this name is real. Some is old work with a new invoice. |
| Labelling your facts | A standard way to label your phone, hours and services so software reads them right. |
| Laying out a page | Answer first, proof in the same section, and nothing important hidden until you click. |
| Checking what AI says about you | An afternoon of asking the questions your customers ask, and writing down what comes back. |
| Letting AI read your site | Your site may already be blocking them without you knowing. How to check, and why it matters. |
Back to AI search visibility, or see what publishing primary data looks like in practice on our contractor website research.