Type your business name into ChatGPT right now. Not into Google, not into your website analytics dashboard, directly into ChatGPT, as a plain question. What comes back? For a significant portion of Australian business owners who run this test, the answer is either a blank, a vague non-answer, or something factually wrong about their own company. That gap between your real-world presence and your AI presence is not a minor inconvenience, it is an active, measurable commercial liability.
Most business owners assume that if they rank on Google, they exist in AI. That assumption is incorrect, and the cost of holding it is growing every quarter. This guide walks you through a practical, five-minute audit you can run today to find out exactly what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews know about your business, and what to do when the answer is not enough.
Search behaviour in Australia has shifted faster than most marketing teams have adapted. Industry estimates now suggest that roughly 40% of Australian consumers use AI tools to research products and services before making a purchase decision. That figure is not a distant forecast, it reflects current behaviour across categories from professional services and home improvement through to healthcare and retail. When a potential customer asks ChatGPT to recommend a bookkeeper in Brisbane, or asks Perplexity to compare landscaping companies in Melbourne's inner suburbs, the businesses that appear in those responses capture the consideration. The businesses that do not appear simply do not exist in that moment.
The critical distinction that most Australian business owners miss is the difference between being indexed by Google and being cited by AI. Google indexing means your pages are crawled and eligible to appear in search results. AI citation means that a large language model has ingested enough corroborating, authoritative information about your business to surface it as a relevant, trustworthy recommendation. These are fundamentally different mechanisms. A business can have strong Google rankings and near-zero AI visibility, particularly if its online footprint lacks the structured, consistent, third-party signals that AI models rely on. Understanding why GEO differs from traditional SEO is the starting point for closing that gap strategically.
This is not about chasing a novelty. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the discipline of ensuring your business is accurately represented in AI-generated responses, and it requires a different approach to the one that got you to page one on Google. The audit below is your first diagnostic step.
Run each of these steps in sequence. Use a fresh browser session or a new ChatGPT conversation for each test to avoid cached context influencing results. Record what you find, this is your baseline.
Open ChatGPT and type exactly: "What can you tell me about [Your Business Name]?"
What to look for: Does the model return accurate information, including your location, service category, and a correct description of what you do? Does it confuse you with a similarly named business? Does it return nothing at all, or say it has no reliable information? A confident, accurate response with specific details is a positive signal. A hedged, generic, or incorrect response tells you your AI footprint is insufficient. Note whether the model mentions any third-party sources, review platforms, directories, or media mentions, as these are the building blocks of AI citation.
Type: "What are the best [your service category] businesses in [your city or suburb]?"
What to look for: Does your business appear in the list? If competitors appear and you do not, that is a direct visibility deficit with commercial consequences. Pay attention to which businesses the model does name and research their online footprint, specifically their presence on Australian directories such as True Local, Yellow Pages Australia, and industry-specific platforms. The pattern of what gets cited reveals the signals the model is weighting. If you are not appearing in category searches, you are invisible at the highest-intent moment in the AI customer journey.
Type: "I'm looking for a [your service category] near [your suburb or postcode]. Can you recommend someone?"
What to look for: This test checks your local AI visibility specifically. Many businesses appear in broad category searches but fail on hyper-local queries, which are increasingly common as Australian consumers use conversational AI the way they previously used Google Maps. If the model recommends businesses in adjacent suburbs but not yours, your location signals are either absent or inconsistent across your digital footprint. Inconsistent NAP data (name, address, phone number) across directories is a common cause of this failure.
Open Perplexity and run the same category and location queries you used in Steps 2 and 3.
What to look for: Perplexity cites its sources in real time, which makes it an exceptionally useful diagnostic tool. When your business does not appear, Perplexity will often show you exactly which sources it did pull from, and those sources are the ones you need to be present on. If you see competitors being cited from platforms like Google Business Profile, industry association directories, or local news coverage, you have a clear action list. Perplexity and ChatGPT do not use identical training data or retrieval mechanisms, so running both tests gives you a more complete picture of your AI visibility across the ecosystem.
Open Google and search: "best [your service category] in [your city]" and look for the AI Overviews panel at the top of the results page.
What to look for: Google AI Overviews draw on a combination of Google's own index and structured data signals, including Google Business Profile, reviews, and schema markup. If your business does not appear in the AI Overview for your primary category and location query, your structured data and review volume are likely insufficient. This test is particularly important for Australian businesses because Google AI Overviews have significant penetration in Australian search traffic and directly influence click-through behaviour on high-intent queries.
The audit above gives you a diagnosis. Here is the treatment plan.
Running the audit once and not acting on it is the most common error, but it is not the only one worth naming.
The manual audit described above is a starting point, not a complete programme. For Australian businesses that want a systematic, ongoing approach to AI visibility, purpose-built tools and specialist expertise are worth the investment.
The Reviewly Visibility Audit provides a structured assessment of your current AI citation profile across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other generative platforms, with specific recommendations mapped to your business category and competitive set. For businesses that want to understand how their AI visibility compares to competitors and what a remediation roadmap looks like, it is a practical next step beyond the DIY checklist.
For a broader view of the specialist landscape, the guide to best GEO agencies in Australia covers the firms currently delivering measurable AI visibility outcomes for Australian businesses across categories. If you are evaluating whether to build this capability in-house or engage a specialist, that resource provides a useful comparative framework.
Reviewly, Australia's Visibility Architecture Partner operates within the Reviewly Distributed Authority Network and offers both audit and implementation services for businesses serious about their generative search presence.
ChatGPT and other large language models build their knowledge of businesses from publicly available, corroborating sources: directory listings, review platforms, industry publications, structured website content, and third-party mentions. If your business has a thin or inconsistent online footprint across these sources, the model either has insufficient data to cite you confidently or has conflicting information that reduces your citation reliability. A strong Google ranking does not compensate for weak off-site signals, because AI citation mechanisms weight different inputs than traditional search ranking algorithms.
For most Australian businesses, a quarterly audit is the practical minimum. AI models are updated on varying cycles, the competitive landscape shifts as more businesses invest in GEO, and your own digital footprint changes as you acquire reviews, update listings, and publish new content. Businesses in highly competitive categories or those that have recently made significant changes to their services, locations, or branding should run the audit monthly to catch visibility changes before they affect revenue.
No. Google indexing and AI citation are separate mechanisms. ChatGPT's training data and retrieval processes draw on a broad corpus of web content, but the model weights authoritative, corroborating signals differently from how Google's ranking algorithm weights on-page SEO factors. A business can have excellent Google visibility and minimal AI visibility if it lacks the structured, consistent, third-party footprint that AI models rely on to form confident, accurate responses about a specific entity.
You cannot directly edit or submit information to ChatGPT the way you can update a Google Business Profile. However, you can influence AI responses indirectly by improving the quality, consistency, and authority of the publicly available information about your business. This includes maintaining accurate directory listings on Australian platforms, building review volume on trusted platforms, publishing structured and informative content on your own site, and earning mentions in credible industry and local media sources. Over time, as AI models are updated or retrieve fresher data, these improvements translate into more accurate and more frequent AI citation.
The five-minute audit tells you what the gap is. The Reviewly Visibility Audit tells you how to close it, with a structured assessment of your AI citation profile and a prioritised action plan built for your specific business category and Australian market.
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