What is AI visibility and why your Swindon business needs it

Something has changed in how people find local businesses. Instead of typing "best plumber in Swindon" into Google, a growing number of customers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews the same question and acting on the answer.

The difference? Google shows you a list of ten blue links. An AI assistant gives you a direct recommendation, often just one or two businesses, with a reason why.

What AI visibility means

AI visibility is whether your business appears in the answers that AI assistants give when someone asks for a local recommendation. It is not the same as traditional SEO, though they share some foundations.

AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity build their answers from structured data, authoritative content and machine-readable formats. If your website has none of these, the AI has nothing to work with. You are invisible to it.

What makes a business visible to AI

Three things matter most:

• Structured data (JSON-LD): Schema markup that tells AI systems exactly what your business does, where it is, and how to contact you.
• FAQ content: Question-and-answer pairs that match how people actually ask voice assistants for help.
• Machine-readable summaries: Files like llms.txt that provide a concise overview of your business specifically for AI crawlers.

Check your score for free

We built a free AI visibility scanner that checks how visible your business is to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI right now. It takes about 30 seconds, no account needed.

Paste your website URL and watch the scanner run a real diagnostic. You will see your current score out of 10 and what it could be after we optimise your listing.