What to actually do this week if AI doesn't know you exist
Somewhere in the last year, "check how your business shows up on Google" quietly stopped being enough. Most people haven't updated the habit yet. So here's the version I'd actually tell a friend to do this week — no tool required for the first step.
Ask the question yourself, more than once. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever you've got, and type the question a real customer would type — "best [what you do] in [where you are]." Don't ask about your business by name. Ask the way a stranger would ask. Do it in two or three different tools if you can, because they genuinely don't agree with each other — I've watched the same business get named first by one model and skipped entirely by another, on the same day. One answer tells you almost nothing. A pattern across a few tells you something real.
Read what it says about the businesses it does name, not just who it names. This is the step people skip. If the model says "Business A is known for fast emergency response" and "Business B offers plumbing services," pay attention to which sentence you just read. One of those is a fact a model could find and repeat. The other is filler it generated because it had nothing sharper to say. If that second sentence is what a model would say about you, that's your actual problem — not visibility.
Go find that sharp sentence about yourself, and if it doesn't exist yet, write it. Not "quality you can trust" — a model can't repeat that, because it's not a fact, it's a mood. Something specific: what you actually do differently, who you're actually for, a number if you have one worth saying — years in business, response time, a certification, whatever's true and distinct. Put it in plain text on your site, not inside an image, not buried three clicks deep in a PDF.
Check that the basics are actually readable by something that isn't a browser. Name, location, category, hours — in real text, not a logo graphic, not a JavaScript widget that never renders for anything that isn't doing a full browser render pass. This sounds boring because it is boring, and it's also the single most common reason a genuinely good business turns up nowhere.
Don't stop at your own site. A lot of what these models pull from isn't your homepage — it's your Google Business Profile, directory listings, review sites, anywhere your name and category already sit together in public text. Those need the same specific, sharp language your site does, not just a filled-in form.
Recheck in a month. These answers move. Models get updated, retrained, re-indexed, and an answer that named a competitor in June can name you in September for reasons that have nothing to do with anything you changed — or everything to do with it. Treat this like something you glance at occasionally, not a box you tick once.
That's genuinely most of it. None of this requires a tool, a budget, or an agency. The first four steps are free and take maybe forty minutes if you're honest with yourself about how vague your "about" page actually is. I built Foreground because doing this by hand, across several AI models, every few weeks, for more than one business, gets tedious fast. The checklist above still works fine with nothing but a browser and twenty honest minutes.
New here? This post is the last of a series — start from the beginning: Google isn't the front page anymore.
— Marc. Foreground automates the checking part above, on a schedule, across four models, if you'd rather not do it by hand. Try it free.