The get-found checklist: nine things to check this week

The quickest way to find out whether AI assistants know about you is to ask them, which takes ten minutes and is the first check below. The other eight cover whether they can reach and read your site, and the gaps most businesses leave. None takes longer than half an hour.

Do them before you buy anything, from us or anyone else. If everything's in order you've saved yourself a subscription, and if half of it makes you wince you'll at least know why.

Three checks to start with

1. Ask the engines about yourself (10 minutes)

Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, then run the same query in Google and read the AI Overview at the top. Ask each the question a buyer would ask, something like "who are the best options for X in [your city]?", and write down every business that gets named.

Then ask again with one detail your buyers would add: "for a small team", say, or "on a tight budget". Compare the two lists. One extra detail can change most of the names.

2. Check whether you're blocking AI crawlers (5 minutes)

Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for entries naming OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User or PerplexityBot followed by "Disallow: /". If you find them and nobody decided to be invisible, that's your first fix.

3. Read your homepage as a stranger (5 minutes)

Could someone tell what you do, who for and where from the first screen alone? Ignore the marketing language and see what's left. If what's left is "transforming outcomes", rewrite the first screen.

Can a model read your pages?

4. Find your one-sentence description (20 minutes)

Write the sentence you want to be known by. It needs what you are, your specialism, who you serve and where. Now check whether that sentence, or something close to it, appears on your homepage, your about page, your LinkedIn and every directory that lists you.

5. Turn off JavaScript and reload (5 minutes)

Disable JavaScript in your browser's developer settings and reload your homepage. If the page goes blank or loses its text, some crawlers get exactly that version.

6. List the ten questions your buyers ask (30 minutes)

Not keywords. Sentences: the things people say in first meetings and on sales calls. When you have ten, go through your site and be honest about whether a page answers each one plainly, in its first paragraph.

The checks people skip

7. Look for the comparison gap (10 minutes)

Do you have a page comparing your approach with the alternatives? Most businesses don't, because it feels awkward to write about competitors on your own site. Buyers ask assistants to compare options all the time, and a page that does it honestly gives them something to quote.

8. Count where else you exist (15 minutes)

Search your company name and count the places, other than your own site, that describe what you do. If there are almost none, start with the directories and associations in your industry.

9. Swap one vague claim for a checkable fact (20 minutes)

Find the strongest claim on your site and make it specific. "Trusted by leading organisations" becomes "used by 16 regional councils". If you can't put a number or a name on a claim, ask whether it belongs there at all.

What to do with what you find

Fix the crawler block first, if you found one. It's usually five minutes' work, and nothing else on this list helps until it's done.

Then the description: the one sentence, the vague claims, the homepage that doesn't say what you do. Content comes last. It's the most expensive part, and by then you know which questions it should answer.

Doing all this by hand has one real limit. Assistants rarely give the same answer twice (SparkToro put the chance of getting the same list of brands twice at less than one in a hundred), so a single check is a snapshot with noise in it. A trend needs the same questions, asked the same way, on a schedule, with the answers kept. Across four engines and a dozen questions that gets tedious quickly, and it's more or less why we built Vizebel.