When a customer asks ChatGPT who to call, does it say your name?
Most Australian trade businesses aren’t named once. We ask 42 real customer questions across your service area — on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — and show you exactly which competitors get recommended instead of you.
Free. No card, no contract, no obligation to do anything with it.
- Coastline Plumbing Co.Strong reviews for emergency callouts
- RapidFlow PlumbingFrequently cited for hot water systems
- Hinterland Drain & PipeWell listed across local directories
Your customers stopped scrolling. They started asking.
People used to type “plumber near me” and pick from ten blue links. Now a lot of them ask ChatGPT, and it hands back three names. Not ten. Three.
If you’re not one of the three, you were never in the running. There’s no page two to be on. And unlike Google, there’s no rank tracker telling you it’s happening — the phone just rings a bit less than it used to.
Almost nobody has. Most owners find out they’re invisible when we show them.
Often a business smaller than yours, with a better-fed listing footprint.
The answer got given on the results page. Nobody needed to click through.
Your SEO bloke tracks Google positions. This isn’t Google, and it isn’t positions.
Check it yourself. Right now. Takes 30 seconds.
You’ll want to do this before you talk to us, because it’s the whole pitch in one go.
- Open a private / incognito browser window.
- Go to ChatGPT. Don’t sign in.
- Ask: “best [your trade] in [your suburb]”.
- Read the names it gives back.
If you’re signed in, ChatGPT already knows who you are — it’s seen you talk about your own business. It gives you your name back. Your customer has none of that history. Signed out is the real test.
We don’t guess. We count.
Every claim on your report traces back to a question we actually asked and an answer we actually got. No opinions, no “AI readiness score” pulled out of the air.
We map your patch
Six areas you actually service — your home suburb plus the surrounding localities where the work comes from. Not a national average. Your streets.
We ask like a customer
“Best [trade] in [suburb].” “Recommend a good [trade] near [suburb].” “I need a [trade], who should I call?” The questions a real person types, in clean sessions with no login, no history and no saved location.
We score every answer
Named or not named — and when you’re not, which businesses got named instead. Every answer is read twice, by two independent methods, and disagreements are flagged on the report.
A report you could hand to your accountant.
Branded, plain English, and specific enough to act on without us. Yours to keep either way.
Your visibility score
Out of 42, broken down by engine. ChatGPT might name you and Gemini might not — that gap tells you where the fix goes first.
Who got named instead
The actual businesses the AI recommended in your suburbs, ranked by how often they came up. This is the page people read twice.
Suburb-by-suburb map
Where you’re named, where you’re invisible. Usually there’s a pattern, and usually it isn’t the one owners expect.
The sources each engine cited
Perplexity shows its working. We pull the directories and pages it actually read, so you know precisely where to be listed.
A fix list, in order
Per engine, biggest lever first. ChatGPT reads Bing’s index, not Google’s — so the fix for ChatGPT is a different job to the fix for Gemini. Most people have never been told that.
A re-run you can diff
Every question has a stable ID, so next month’s run compares line for line against this one. You see movement, not vibes.
Service businesses that live or die on the phone ringing.
If your customer’s problem is urgent and local — a burst pipe, no power, ants in the kitchen — they’re asking AI now. Those are exactly the searches AI has taken over fastest, because the person wants one answer, not a list.
Not on the list? The method doesn’t care what the trade is — if people ask AI to recommend one, we can measure it.
We ran the first audit on ourselves. We failed it.
Johnni AI sells AI receptionists. You’d think we’d show up when someone asks ChatGPT for one. We didn’t — not once, across eight phrasings.
That’s the point. Being good at the job and being findable by an AI are two unrelated things. One is your trade. The other is a plumbing problem in your listings — and it’s fixable.
What we found on ourselves
Verified 1 August 2026:
- 8 different phrasings through a clean session — named 0 times.
- 5 different model versions, same question — 0 mentions, each naming a different set of real Australian competitors. So the search was genuinely running.
- The Bing index itself — which is what ChatGPT reads — didn’t have us in the top 10 for our own category. ChatGPT can’t name what isn’t there.
Find out free. Fix it for a fixed price. Then watch it monthly.
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them.
AI Visibility Audit
- 42 questions across 6 of your service areas
- ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
- The competitors named instead of you
- Full written report, yours to keep
- A short video of me walking you through it
Fix Sprint
- Bing Places claimed and completed properly
- Name, address and phone made consistent everywhere the engines read
- Listings won on the exact directories your report showed being cited
- Service-area pages so the index knows where you work
- Schema,
llms.txtand AI-crawler access sorted - Re-audit at the end so you can see what moved
Monthly Watch
- The same 42 questions re-run every month
- Movement report — what changed since last month, line by line
- Alerts when a new competitor starts getting named
- Ongoing listing and content upkeep as the engines shift
All prices AUD, ex GST. The audit is genuinely free — plenty of people take the report and fix it themselves, and that’s fine.
Four reasons this isn’t the same as the SEO email you deleted this morning.
It’s measured, not asserted
Most “AI SEO” is a slide deck. This is 42 logged questions with the raw answers kept. You can audit our audit.
We test the customer’s view, not yours
Clean sessions, no login, no history, no saved location. That’s the position someone who’s never heard of you is actually in.
We also answer your phone
Johnni AI is an AI receptionist business first. Getting named puts more phones ringing — we’re the only ones in this game who can also make sure someone picks up.
Australian, and trades-only
Built here, for businesses that work suburbs. Not a US template with the spelling changed and “near me” bolted on.
Straight answers
I checked and I DO show up. So what’s this about?
You were signed in. When you’re logged into ChatGPT it carries your memory, your saved details and your location — and it’s seen you talk about your own business. So it hands your name back to you. That’s your account being helpful.
Your customer has none of that. They’ve never heard of you — that’s the whole point, they’re asking because they don’t know who to call. Open a private window, don’t sign in, ask the same thing. That’s the answer they get, and that’s the one we measure.
How is this different to normal SEO?
Normal SEO gets you a position in a list of links. This gets you named in a written answer where there is no list.
They overlap — a solid local SEO footprint helps both — but the levers are different. ChatGPT’s live answers are grounded in Bing’s index, not Google’s, so a business that ranks beautifully on Google can be completely invisible in ChatGPT. Most SEO people have never touched Bing Places.
The industry calls this answer engine optimisation (AEO) or generative engine optimisation (GEO). Same thing we’re describing here — we just prefer plain English.
How long until it changes?
Listing and index fixes typically start showing up in answers within a few weeks, because the engines re-read their sources far more often than Google re-crawls your site. Content and authority work is slower.
We won’t promise you a date. The monthly re-run is there so you can see it moving instead of taking our word for it.
Do the answers change every time you ask?
Yes — that’s why one screenshot proves nothing and we ask 42 questions instead of one. A single answer is noise. A pattern across 42 across three engines is a signal.
Your report is a point-in-time snapshot and says so plainly. That’s also the honest argument for re-running it monthly rather than once.
What’s the catch on “free”?
There isn’t one. It costs us a couple of dollars in API charges and about twenty minutes. Roughly nobody looks at their own report and does nothing, so it’s a good trade for us even when you fix it yourself.
You get the full report either way. No card, and you don’t have to take a call to receive it.
Do you need access to my website or Google account?
Not for the audit. We need your business name, your trade and your main suburb — that’s it. Everything we measure is what a stranger can see from the outside.
If you go ahead with the Fix Sprint we’ll need access to your Google Business Profile and your website, and we’ll walk you through granting it.
Is traditional SEO dead then?
No, and be careful of anyone who says it is. Most of your enquiries still come through Google search and the map pack, and that’s where the money is today.
The shift is real but it’s a shift, not a switch. This is about covering the channel nobody’s watching yet — while it’s still cheap and while your competitors haven’t noticed. If you’re weighing up providers, we’ve also put together an honest comparison of the AI receptionists available in Australia.
What if the audit says I’m doing fine?
Then we’ll tell you that and you’ve lost nothing. It happens — usually for businesses with a big review footprint and consistent listings.
If that’s you, the useful version is the monthly watch: staying named is a different job to getting named, and the businesses below you are actively working on it.
Who actually does the work?
Brodie, and the systems we’ve built. Johnni AI is a small Australian company — you deal with the person doing the job, not an account manager relaying it.
Find out what the AI says about you.
Leave me your details and I’ll run all 42 questions on your business. You’ll get the report back within 48 hours — with a short video of me walking you through what it found.
Free, no card, no contract, and no call to sit through. If it turns out you’re already being named, I’ll tell you that and we’ll leave it there.