Category
Diagnostic
23 articles in this category.
What Google's AI answer says when customers search your name
A customer who types your business name may read a paragraph Google wrote first. Here is the two-minute check and the fix.
Your license record is one of the pages ChatGPT reads
When ChatGPT cited a government site in a new test, it was usually a license look-up. Read your own record first.
Is ChatGPT giving customers the wrong phone number for your business?
Ask ChatGPT for your business's phone number, then dial it. What a 250-pick test and a 10,000-business study found.
Google charges Local Services advertisers for missed calls in listed hours
The new rule covers unanswered calls and applies only to Local Services Ads. Read your listed hours, then call your own number.
ChatGPT changed this week, so check what it tells your customers
ChatGPT, where your customers ask about local businesses, started changing on Wednesday. Here is a five-minute check to run today.
Google now counts made-up author names on your blog as deception
Open your newest blog post and click the name under the title. On 5 October, Google wrote down what it thinks of a name nobody can stand behind.
ChatGPT can name your business and still get your hours wrong
About a third of the business details ChatGPT and Perplexity read out are wrong, and they were copied off records you can open and edit.
The one part of your Google listing you cannot edit
Google draws a busy-hours chart and a wait time on your listing from customer phones, and there is no field in your account where you can fix it.
A stranger can put a phone number on your Google listing
Open the Photos tab on your Google listing. Any picture you did not upload could be carrying a phone number that is not yours.
What ChatGPT says about your business partly comes from your customers
Ask ChatGPT about your own business by name. Whatever it names as a reason to hesitate is something a customer already wrote down somewhere.
Google now shows how often its AI used your pages
Search Console now counts how often Google's AI put your pages in front of someone. The count stops there, and it's still worth reading.
Why ChatGPT can't find your prices and where they hide
One test page hid eight prices in eight places, and only the ones a customer could read came back from the five AI systems.
Google Analytics now counts the visitors AI assistants send you
A free line in your traffic report now counts the visitors AI assistants send you. Finding your number takes about five minutes.
Why AI recommends only one to three local businesses
The named slot in an AI answer is short and hard to win. What decides it is whether a machine can say, in plain words, what you do.
Getting named by AI is only half the sale
AI can name your business and you can still lose the customer at your own front door. Here is why, and the free 5-minute check.
Why ChatGPT recommends other businesses instead of yours
You can spend real money on your website and still lose the AI answer to a page you never wrote. Here is why, and the free 5-minute check.
Your HVAC photos might be why AI skips your business
A logo and one front-door shot tell the machine nothing. Here is the free photo routine that helps AI name your HVAC business.
Wrong business hours are quietly dropping you from AI answers
A five-star business can vanish from a Saturday-night AI answer because its listed hours disagree. Here is the ten-minute fix.
AI assistants recommend very few local businesses. Small ones can win.
You asked ChatGPT for the best shop near you and never heard your own name. Here is why the list is short, and why small can win it.
Why Your Top-Ranked Page Is Invisible in ChatGPT
Your page can rank #1 in Google and still be invisible in ChatGPT. The mismatch is shape, and most SMB pages have the wrong one.
The AI crawler access problem most SMB sites have not audited
About 14 percent of the web's top sites name GPTBot in their robots.txt. Here is how to check whether yours is blocking the bots behind AI search.
Why domain authority doesn't guarantee AI citations
The sites ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity cite aren't always the ones with the most backlinks. They're the ones with the clearest structure.
Why your good SEO rankings don't guarantee AI search visibility
Strong SEO no longer guarantees citations from ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity. Here is why the two have decoupled this quarter and what to do about it.