Answer library

Answers to the questions people ask out loud

Thirty-one questions about AI visibility, one page each. Every page opens with a short answer that still makes sense on its own, then gives you the working underneath it.

By Answerable · Published 1 August 2026 · Melbourne, Australia

How these are evidenced: every number on these pages comes either from our own scan of 300 Australian businesses, published in full with the raw data under CC BY 4.0 so you can recompute it, or from a public source we name and date; where the honest answer is that nobody has measured it, the page says so instead of supplying a number.

7Finding out what AI actually says about you 9The levers, and which ones actually move 7Measuring it without fooling yourself 8Timing, scope and what nobody can promise
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Cluster 1

Finding out what AI actually says about you

Before anything gets fixed, you need to know which of the three failure states you are in: never named, named but never recommended, or named with the wrong facts.

How do I check what ChatGPT says about my business? Ask the buyer question your customers would ask, in a fresh chat, before you ask about yourself by name. The two answers measure different things and you need both. Read the answer Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor and not me? Usually because something outside their website corroborates them and nothing outside yours corroborates you. Across our 300-business scan, on-site readiness tracked per-engine visibility at only r = 0.116. Read the answer ChatGPT knows my business but never recommends it. Why? This is its own failure state, not a milder version of invisibility. It affected 26% of the 137 Australian businesses with complete records from both engines in our 2026 study. Read the answer What is the difference between an AI recognising my business and recommending it? Recognition only needs the engine to hold a fact about you, because your name is already in the question. Recommendation needs you in the candidate set for a question that never mentions you. 26% of the 137 complete two-engine records in our scan were recognised and never volunteered. Read the answer ChatGPT has the wrong information about my business. How do I fix it? You cannot edit the model, only the sources it reads. Correct your own site, your Google Business Profile and whichever directories still carry the stale fact, then wait for a recrawl. Read the answer Where does ChatGPT get its information about my business? From training data, from live web retrieval when it searches, and from third-party pages that describe you. Your own website is one input among several, not the authority. Read the answer Does ChatGPT know about Australian businesses? Some of them, unevenly. Of the 300 search-visible Australian businesses we scanned on 30 July 2026, 54% were never named by ChatGPT in any answer we recorded. Read the answer

Cluster 2

The levers, and which ones actually move

Most of the advice in this category is about markup. Our own data says markup is necessary and nowhere near sufficient, so these pages say which lever does what and how much.

Does schema markup help with AI search? It makes you parseable, which is necessary and not sufficient. 24% of the 300 sites we scanned carry no JSON-LD at all, yet site readiness alone barely predicted who got named. Read the answer Do I need an llms.txt file? No. It costs an hour and it makes your site legible, and 71% of the 300 sites we scanned had none, but Google has said it does not use llms.txt. Tidy, not decisive. Read the answer Should I block AI crawlers from my website? Not if you want to be recommended. 13% of the 300 businesses we scanned block AI crawlers in robots.txt, so the engines cannot read their websites at all. Read the answer Does my Google Business Profile affect whether AI recommends me? It is the record that Google surfaces read from, so for local questions it is worth getting exactly right. It is not, on its own, the reason an assistant names you. Read the answer Do Google reviews affect whether AI recommends me? Indirectly. Reviews are corroboration an assistant can read and quote. No published evidence sets a review count that flips an engine into recommending you, and anyone quoting one is guessing. Read the answer Do I need a Wikipedia page to be recommended by AI? No. Wikipedia's own notability rules exclude most small businesses and paid page creation has to be disclosed. Recognisable anchor brands did score higher in our study, 52.5 against 36.4, but the lever is corroboration anywhere credible. Read the answer How do I write a page so AI can quote it? One question per page, and a self-contained answer of about 40 to 70 words in the first block. Test it by deleting everything else and checking the answer still stands up. Read the answer How do I rank number 1 in ChatGPT? You cannot, because ChatGPT has no ranking. Every answer is generated fresh for that conversation, so there is no ordered list to reach the top of. The target that replaces rank is being named at all, and named consistently. Read the answer Is AI visibility just SEO with a new name? Partly, and anyone selling it as a wholly new discipline is overselling. But it is not a pure rebrand: site readiness averaged 74.9 out of 100 while correlating just r = 0.116 with being recommended, across the 137 businesses with complete records from both engines. Read the answer

Cluster 3

Measuring it without fooling yourself

AI answers are generated fresh every time, so a single good answer is an anecdote. These pages cover what to count, how often, and what the counting cannot see.

What is a good AI visibility score? On our published scale, 70 and above is visible, 35 to 69 is partly visible and under 35 is weak. The Australian average across 300 businesses is 38.3, median 36. Read the answer Which Australian industry has the worst AI visibility? Tradies, of the six industries we measured. 76% of the tradie businesses with complete two-engine records, 16 of 21, were never named once by ChatGPT or Gemini, on the lowest mean score in the study at 29.8 against a national mean of 38.3. Read the answer Why do I get a different answer every time I ask ChatGPT? Because answers are generated fresh with sampling, and live retrieval pulls different sources each run. One answer is an anecdote. Use a fixed question set and count across repeats. Read the answer How do I track traffic from ChatGPT in Google Analytics? Segment session source for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com. Expect it to undercount: a buyer shown your name who then searches it leaves no AI referral behind. Read the answer How much is a ChatGPT mention worth? Nobody has credibly measured it and we hold no attribution data of our own, so any dollar figure you are quoted is invented. Work out your own instead: gross profit per closed job, times close rate, times the enquiries you attribute to AI. Read the answer How do I know if AI visibility work is actually working? Count how often you are named, on a fixed question set, on a fixed cadence, and hold the questions still while you change the inputs. Referral traffic alone will miss most of the effect. Read the answer How often should I check my AI visibility? Monthly for most businesses, weekly while you are actively working on it. Checking more often than that mostly measures the run-to-run noise rather than any change you made. Read the answer

Cluster 4

Timing, scope and what nobody can promise

The questions people ask right before they spend money. Where the honest answer is "nobody knows", these pages say so rather than filling the gap with a number.

How long does it take to show up in ChatGPT? Anything reached by live retrieval can change within days of a recrawl. Anything held in training data will not move until a model is retrained, and nobody outside the labs can date that. Read the answer How often does ChatGPT update what it knows about my business? There is no single update cycle. Live retrieval can reflect a change as soon as your page is crawled again, while the training corpus does not move until a new model is trained. No vendor publishes a schedule for either. Read the answer Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my business? No, and no honest firm will. The answer is generated fresh each time, there is no ranking lever to buy or pull, and the models change without notice. What can be committed to is measurement you can reproduce and work defined in advance. Read the answer Should I optimise for ChatGPT or Gemini? Do the work once, for both, and measure both. Gemini scored the same business higher than ChatGPT for 105 of the 137 complete records in our scan, ChatGPT higher for 7, and 25 were tied. Read the answer Does AI visibility work for a new business with no reviews and no backlinks? The work is the same but the honest starting point is lower, because being named runs on corroboration you do not have yet. Build the citable sources before the markup. Read the answer How many Australians actually use AI to find businesses? Nobody should quote a round number here without naming who measured it and when. This page gives the published Australian survey figures with the research house and date attached, plus the supply side we counted ourselves. Read the answer Should I hire an agency or buy an AI visibility tool? Buy a tool if you only need to know where you stand. Hire someone if you need the position to change. A monitoring tool measures: it does not write pages, correct your business data or earn a mention on a site the models read. Read the answer How do I choose an AI visibility agency? Judge them on evidence you can check: a published method, the raw data behind any statistic they quote, and the actual AI answers behind a client result. Any guarantee of a ranking or a placement is disqualifying, because no supplier controls what a model generates. Read the answer

Beyond the answers

If your question is bigger than one question

These four are not single-question pages. They are the longer documents the answers above keep citing.

Original research

The State of AI Visibility in Australia 2026

300 Australian businesses scanned across ChatGPT and Gemini on 30 July 2026, with every row published under CC BY 4.0.

Read the study

Method

The Receipts Engine

The scoring formula in full, what is counted rather than judged, and the limits we do not claim past.

See how we count

Figures

AI visibility statistics: Australia 2026

Every headline number from the study in citable form, each carrying the denominator it was counted over.

See the numbers

Terms

AI visibility glossary

32 AI-search terms defined in plain English, each written short enough to be quoted whole.

Read the glossary

Your question, on your business.

The free scan asks the same buyer questions we used in the study, about you, and shows one real quote of what an engine said today. No email gate.

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