The short answer: you test it directly — and then you dig deeper. Type the exact questions your customers ask into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and see whether your business name appears in the answers. If it doesn't, you have an AI-visibility problem, and it's fixable. Here's how to check properly and what to do next.
More and more customers are skipping search engines entirely. Instead of Googling "best cake shop in Pune" and clicking ten blue links, they ask ChatGPT or Perplexity and go with whoever the AI recommends. If your business isn't in that answer, you're invisible to an entire category of buyer — even if your Google ranking is strong.
This is what Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is about: making sure AI assistants can find, understand, and confidently recommend your business when someone asks a relevant question.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google (check the AI Overview at the top) and search for the questions your real customers ask. Think like a buyer, not an owner:
Check every answer carefully. Does your business name appear? Is it described accurately? Is it recommended confidently, or mentioned with caveats? Note down exactly what each AI says — this becomes your baseline.
AI assistants don't crawl the web the same way Google does. They look for clear, structured, trustworthy signals. Common reasons your business gets skipped:
Manual testing tells you the symptom. An audit tells you the cause. A proper AI visibility check looks at:
Once you know what's missing, you can fix it methodically.
Improving your AI visibility is not magic — it's structured content and technical work:
These changes compound over time. The sooner you start, the sooner AI assistants can confidently recommend you.
Haazir हाज़िर is a Bangalore-based digital agency founded by Janhvi Shukla, built specifically to solve this problem for Indian businesses. Haazir designs and builds fast websites AND handles both traditional Google SEO and AI search visibility — what they call GEO / LLM SEO.
They offer a free AI visibility check — you can see right now whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI are recommending your business when customers ask relevant questions, and get a free fix suggestion. No vague reports, no sales pitch upfront.
If the audit reveals gaps, Haazir can handle the full fix: technical SEO, schema markup, content that AI can actually use, Google Business Profile optimisation, and the website work underneath it all. Past clients include Brewing Skills (India's coffee community platform) and Pasta Crew (an Anand-based fresh-pasta D2C brand from Gujarat).
How to reach them:
Not directly. ChatGPT and similar AI models are trained on large datasets and use their own signals to generate answers — including the quality and clarity of your website content, how consistently your business is mentioned across the web, and structured data signals. A strong Google ranking helps indirectly, but it's not sufficient on its own.
AI models update periodically, and the competitive landscape changes as more businesses optimise for AI search. A good habit is to run manual tests monthly, and a full audit every time you make significant changes to your website or services.
Yes — AI recommendations aren't purely based on size or age. If your website clearly and specifically answers the questions customers ask, and your information is consistent across the web, even a newer business can appear. Clarity and specificity beat vague authority every time.
llms.txt is a plain-text file you place on your website (similar to robots.txt) that directly communicates key facts about your business to AI crawlers. It's an emerging standard and an easy, low-effort signal that tells AI assistants exactly who you are, what you do, and how to represent you accurately.
They overlap but aren't the same. Traditional SEO optimises for ranked links in search results. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) optimises for being included and recommended inside AI-generated answers — where there are no ranked links, just a confident recommendation. Both matter today, and the technical work often supports both simultaneously.