Is There a Tool That Checks If AI Recommends Your Trades Business?

How to find out if AI chatbots are sending customers your way, and where a monitoring tool earns its keep.

More Aussies are asking AI tools who to hire before they ever open Google. 45% of consumers now use AI tools to choose local businesses, up from 6% a year earlier, which means your business either shows up in those answers or it doesn't. The good news is you can check this yourself right now, for free, in about ten minutes.

What 'AI visibility checking' actually means

AI visibility checking is simply testing whether tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention your business when someone asks a relevant question. It's not about your website ranking on page one anymore. Those AI tools pull answers from a mix of your Google Business Profile, reviews, directory listings and website content, then summarise it in plain language.

If they don't have enough clean, consistent information about you, they'll recommend someone else, usually a competitor who's easier for the AI to understand and trust.

How to test it yourself for free

You don't need any software to get started. Open each tool separately and ask questions the way a real customer would.

• Ask 'who's a good [your trade] in [your suburb]?' in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
• Try a few variations: 'emergency plumber near me', 'best rated electrician in [suburb]'
• Note whether your business name comes up at all, and if the details mentioned are correct
• Search in an incognito browser too, since AI overviews now sit above normal Google results
• Repeat monthly, since AI answers change as the tools update their sources

Why manual checking has limits

Doing this by hand works fine as a one-off health check, but it has gaps. AI answers shift depending on wording, location and even time of day. A single search tells you what happened once, not a pattern. It's also easy to miss that Google's own top result is losing ground too, the number one Google result loses 58% of its clicks when an AI answer appears above it, so relying on old-school SEO alone leaves you exposed on two fronts.

This is where a dedicated monitoring tool earns its place. Rather than you remembering to check three apps every month, a tool tracks mentions over time, flags when your listing details are wrong or missing, and shows you patterns instead of one snapshot. Wombid's tracking feature does this, but it's worth knowing this is a growing category now, not something only one company offers. If you want a starting point, Wombid's free AI Visibility Audit will show you where you currently stand before you decide whether ongoing tracking is worth paying for.

The bits most tradies overlook

Two things are shifting the ground right now. First, Google tightened its rules in April 2026 around how businesses can ask for reviews, which means the old habit of texting every customer the same generic review link is riskier than it used to be. A compliant, built-in review request process matters more now, which is part of why Wombid's Growth tier bakes this into the review engine rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Second, most tradies only check Google. Bing Places and Foursquare still feed some AI tools and voice assistants, and plenty of businesses have never claimed those listings at all. It costs nothing to claim them, and it closes a gap your competitors probably haven't noticed either.

Common questions