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Who are the best [what you do] in [your suburb]?
Am I named at all? Type it the way a customer would. Never type your business name, that tells it the answer.
WA Leaders · 20 August 2026
It just has a new mouth, and it is making recommendations about your business right now. Here is how to check what it says, and what to do about it on Monday.
Your phone · about 12 minutes · no logins, no software. Run them in ChatGPT, Gemini or Google. Tap Copy, paste, then swap the bracketed bits for your own details.
Who are the best [what you do] in [your suburb]?
Am I named at all? Type it the way a customer would. Never type your business name, that tells it the answer.
Why not [your business name]?
The best prompt on this page, and almost nobody runs it. Ask it straight after prompt 1. It will actually tell you why it left you out, and often name the source it used instead.
Tell me about [your business] in [your city]. How big are they, what services, what do they charge, what areas do they cover?
What does it think it knows? Score all four fields right or wrong. Be honest, don't grade generously.
Where did you get that? List the specific websites you used.
Turns this into a to-do list. Every URL it names is a page shaping your reputation that you have probably never read. If it can't give sources, it guessed.
| You got | What it actually means | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Not mentioned at all | Not a penalty. Nothing has been done to you. There is nowhere other than your own website where somebody talks about you, and it doesn't take your word for it. | 2 |
| Competitors named instead | They aren't better than you. They're in sources you aren't in. Go and look at where those names came from. | 2 |
| Named, but details wrong | Your information conflicts. Website, Google profile and old directory listings disagree, and it's averaging you. | 3 |
| Named once, gone next time | Normal. The same question three times named the same Australian tradies 8% of the time. That's a coin toss, not a ranking. | 2 + 4 |
| No sources given | It fabricated the answer, and it will fabricate a different one tomorrow. | 4 |
Four jobs, roughly in order of value per dollar.
Go to yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt in any browser. Look for OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended or ClaudeBot on a Disallow line. Check Cloudflare and your security plugin too, they block AI crawlers by default on some settings.
OpenAI's own docs: sites blocking OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." Free, five seconds, and it silently switches people off. Can't read the file? Run Cloudflare's free scanner at isitagentready.com, no login. Read its robots.txt section and ignore the agentic-commerce parts.
A high score is step 1 finished, not the job done. One Perth clinic we work with scores 100/100. That only proves the door is open, not that anyone walks through it. That is what step 2 is for.
Free listings: ProductReview.com.au · Hipages · Airtasker · Localsearch · Word of Mouth · Yellow Pages (free listing only) · Trustpilot · your industry association.
Then the bit that actually matters: be present where people discuss your category, not just where you're listed. Reddit and the local Facebook groups. Plus wherever your competitors got named in prompt 4.
Being mentioned correlates with AI visibility at 0.66. Backlinks at 0.22. PR belongs here too: the wire page itself rarely gets cited for a "best X in Perth" question, but a release that gets picked up by a real publication becomes exactly the earned mention that counts. Judge PR on who ran it, not how many wires carried it.
About the American list. Angi, Thumbtack and the Better Business Bureau barely exist here, so that advice is wasted money. Yelp is the interesting one: it was observed being cited by Perplexity for Australian trades, off a platform almost no Australian uses. Which tells you the model isn't reading the Australian market so much as reading the American internet and guessing at us.
Name, address, phone, service list and service area identical on your website, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and every directory you're listed in. Identical, not similar.
Honest caveat: nobody has published a controlled test that this moves AI answers. It is cheap and obviously correct, so do it anyway.
Put the real answers on your own site. Pricing ranges. Service areas. What you don't do. With actual numbers in them.
Peer-reviewed research: adding quotations lifted visibility 41%, adding statistics 31%. Keyword stuffing dropped it 8%.
Run all four prompts again in three months. Not sooner. The answers move, and the only trend that matters is your own.
Four things you will be sold that do not work.
Google has said twice, June 2025 and June 2026, that no AI system uses it. Their own documentation says you don't need to create AI text files. If you have been billed for one, that is a conversation worth having.
Google's documentation, verbatim: "There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add." The best controlled study, 1,885 pages against 4,000 controls, found no uplift on any platform. Do schema for normal rich results, don't pay a premium for an AI version.
OpenAI's own help documentation says there is no way to guarantee top placement. You can now buy a clearly labelled ad slot beside the answer, which is a different product and they should say so. Guaranteed inclusion in the organic answer is something the platform states cannot exist.
Asked 100 times, there is less than a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of businesses twice, and roughly 1 in 1,000 of getting them in the same order. In August 2026 the industry's own standards body said there is still no agreed definition of what a mention even is.
AU Australian US United States UK / GL elsewhere
No charge, no pitch. Email me your domain and I'll send you back what the models actually say about you, where they got it, and which of the four steps you need. If the answer is "you're fine", I'll tell you that too.