ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity answer questions about businesses like yours every single day. What is the best dog walker in Harrogate? Is there a garden room company near York worth talking to? Who should I trust to redo our website? The answers come back fluent, confident and specific - and your business is either in them or it is not.
The rankings check nobody is running
For twenty years, "how visible are we?" meant one thing: where do we sit on Google. Whole industries grew up around that question. But a growing share of buying decisions now starts with a question typed into an AI assistant, and the answer arrives as a recommendation, not a list of ten blue links. There is no page two. Either the assistant names you, or the enquiry you never knew about goes to someone else.
Almost nobody is measuring this. Businesses that check their Google position weekly have no idea what the assistants say about them - or worse, what the assistants say about their competitors when asked the exact questions their customers ask.
Measuring it is straightforward
The method is not complicated. Take the questions a real customer would ask - the best X near Y, is Z any good, who does W - and put them to the assistants on a schedule. Record whether your business is cited, in what terms, and who is named instead. Track it over time the way you track rankings.
That is exactly what Nexus does. Each workspace carries a set of tracked prompts, phrased the way customers actually speak, and the platform runs them regularly and records the verdicts: cited or not cited, with the excerpt. The result is a visibility score for the AI layer - the census your rankings report never covered.
Either the assistant names you, or the enquiry goes to someone else.
What moves the score
The encouraging news: the same substance that earns search rankings earns AI citations, with a twist. Assistants lean on sources they can read cleanly and trust - well-structured pages, consistent business details, genuine reviews, and plain statements of what you do and where you do it. A page written to answer a customer's actual question outperforms a page written to impress. Structured data helps. A well-kept Google Business Profile helps. An llms.txt file stating the facts about your business in your own words helps more than most people expect.
Start with the questions
If you do nothing else this month, do this: write down the five questions a customer would ask an assistant just before choosing you, then ask them yourself in ChatGPT and Claude. Read what comes back as if you were the customer. If you are not in the answer, that is not a verdict - it is a to-do list.
Being talked about was always the goal of marketing. The assistants are talking. The only question is whether you are listening.