The signals AI reads about a local business
When we review a local business, we ask AI assistants real customer questions about its kind of business in its city, store what they answered, and check the business against the signals those answers get built from. Every signal comes back with the supporting observation shown. This page is the public version of that checklist: what gets checked, defined exactly the way we define it.
The checklist covers the signals AI reads about a local business: your reviews, your Google Business Profile, whether AI can read your website, whether your site answers real customer questions, your presence on the directories AI actually cites, what independent sources say about you, and whether your information agrees everywhere. Each one is something we can check and show the answer behind.
The signals, defined exactly
These definitions are the ones we use when we review a business, because documentation that paraphrases itself isn’t documentation.
Your Reviews. What your review volume, recency, and the actual words customers use tell AI about you. The full explainer is its own post; the short version of why it leads this list is that review signals decide more mentions than any other single input.
Your Google Business Profile. Whether your profile gives AI-adjacent systems complete, current, correctly categorized information. What AI pulls from it and what it ignores gets its own treatment.
Your Website’s Readability to AI. Whether AI systems can technically reach and parse your site’s content. You can run the core checks on your own site in a few minutes.
Your Answers. Whether your site answers, in plain language, the questions customers actually ask AI. The quotable-answers signal is the one owners most underrate.
Your Citations and Directories. Whether you’re present and accurate on the short list of third-party listings AI demonstrably reads. Short list is the operative phrase; most directories don’t feed answers at all.
What Others Say About You. The independent corroboration: press, forums, community mentions, professional and manufacturer listings. Third-party words outweigh your own for a machine deciding whom to trust.
Consistency. Whether your name, address, phone, hours, and service claims agree everywhere AI looks. Disagreement quietly costs mentions and produces wrong answers about you.
Why one strong signal doesn’t carry the rest
The signals corroborate each other, and machines lean on corroboration. Glowing reviews attached to a profile with dead hours read as a business that might be gone; a perfect website AI can’t crawl reads as nothing at all. We review each signal separately precisely so you can see which link in the chain is yours to fix first, because the answer gets assembled from all of them at once.
How findings become a report
Findings, not a score. Each signal comes back with the specific supporting observation under it (an answer excerpt or an observed gap) and the actions ranked by expected impact. There’s no 0-to-100 number because an invented composite implies precision the checks don’t have, and this checklist follows the same published methodology as everything else we measure.
The snapshot, and the ongoing version
Any one review is a dated snapshot: these questions, these answers, this week. That’s exactly what makes it honest and exactly what it can’t outrun, because answers move for their own reasons and a snapshot ages. Continuous tracking is the same discipline running on an ongoing basis across the questions we track for you, which is why a one-time review doubles as a preview of what the monthly service watches all the time.
What this checklist is not
Not a ranking audit, not a traffic report, not a promise, and not a sales trap dressed as a diagnostic: a review tells you what’s solid as plainly as what’s missing, and plenty come back with a short fix list and no reason to pay anyone. Our opinion, kept for last on purpose: a free check that can’t say “you’re mostly fine” isn’t a check, it’s a funnel. The hands-off way to see where you stand is the free AI visibility report.