In April 2026, Google quietly disclosed that AI Overviews — the AI-generated summary at the top of search results — now answer roughly 35% of all queries before the user ever scrolls to the blue links. ChatGPT has 200 million weekly users, and Anthropic reports that "find me a [trade] near [city]" is one of the top 20 prompt categories. If those engines don't mention your business in their answer, you have just lost a customer who never typed your name into Google. Most local businesses are blind to this. They check their Google rank, see they're position 3 in the map pack, and assume everything is fine. It isn't.
Why AI visibility is a new SEO category
Traditional local SEO optimises for the question: "when a customer searches Google for 'emergency plumber London', am I in the top 3?" That question is still important, but a new question has arrived alongside it: "when a customer asks ChatGPT 'who's a reliable emergency plumber in Battersea?', am I one of the businesses it names?"
The mechanics are different. Google's local pack is fed by Google Business Profile signals — reviews, proximity, category, completeness. ChatGPT and Claude don't query Google Business Profile. They query their training data, plus (increasingly) live web search results, plus the structured snippets sites like Yelp, Trustpilot, and TripAdvisor expose. Being invisible to AI engines is not the same problem as being invisible to Google, and the fixes aren't identical.
The five engines that matter
For local-business discovery in the UK, five AI engines collectively cover the vast majority of AI-driven referrals:
- ChatGPT — by volume, the dominant AI search tool. ~200M weekly active users.
- Google AI Overviews (AIO) — embedded in Google search itself, answers ~35% of queries.
- Claude — Anthropic's assistant, used heavily by knowledge workers searching for B2B services.
- Gemini — Google's standalone assistant, increasingly integrated with Maps for hyper-local recommendations.
- Perplexity — citation-first AI search, popular with researchers and journalists. Punches above its weight on consideration-stage queries.
Together, these five drive almost every AI-mediated local-business referral in the UK. Bing's Copilot and a few smaller engines round out the long tail.
How to test whether AI knows your business
You don't need a tool to start. Open each engine and try these prompts, replacing the bracketed parts with your trade and city:
- "Recommend three [trade] in [city]."
- "I need an emergency [trade] near [neighbourhood] tonight — who should I call?"
- "What's the best [trade] in [city] for [specific service]?"
- "Are there any well-reviewed [trade] in [city]?"
- "Who's the most trusted [trade] in [city]?"
Run the same five prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google search (looking at the AI Overview, not the blue links). Tally how many engines mention your business. That number — let's call it your AI Visibility Score, out of 25 — is now a metric you can track over time.
The Vimub methodology
We do this automatically for our customers, on a weekly schedule, against a customised prompt set per industry and locale. The methodology:
- 5 engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews.
- Weekly cadence: every Monday morning, results land in the dashboard by 9am.
- Per-locale prompts: a plumber in Cardiff gets Welsh-specific prompts; a dentist in Edinburgh gets prompts using Scottish locality terms.
- Structured scoring: mention = 1 point, top-3 mention = 2 points, top-1 mention = 3 points. Sentiment of the mention (positive / neutral / negative) is tracked separately.
- Citation tracking: which web sources is the engine drawing from when it mentions you? This is the input to actually improving the score.
Case study: a London plumber from 0/5 to 4/5 in 90 days
A South London plumber (we'll call them PlumbCo to keep their consent simple) joined Vimub in February 2026. Initial AI Visibility audit: 0/5 — not a single engine mentioned them when asked for plumbers in their borough. They had 47 Google reviews at 4.9 stars, which is respectable, but no engine cited them.
What we did over 90 days, in priority order:
- Citations. We submitted them to the 18 UK directories that AI engines most commonly draw from (Yell, Checkatrade, MyBuilder, TrustATrader, Bark, Trustpilot, and 12 more). Most were missing.
- Schema markup on their website. LocalBusiness JSON-LD with full opening hours, service area, services list, and aggregateRating. ChatGPT in particular weights this heavily.
- Trustpilot reviews. They had 47 on Google, 0 on Trustpilot. We funnelled 30% of review requests to Trustpilot for 60 days to seed a credible Trustpilot profile.
- Blog content. Three deep, locally-flavoured posts: "emergency boiler repair Battersea", "underfloor heating repair south London", "Worcester Bosch service Clapham". Written for humans, structured for LLM ingestion (clear H2/H3, named entities, FAQ schema).
- Press mentions. We helped them get quoted in two local-news pieces about energy bills, which gave them authoritative outbound citations.
By day 90: 4/5 engines mentioned them. Perplexity and Claude consistently put them in the top three. ChatGPT named them when asked specifically for emergency plumbers. Only Google AIO held out — and that one tends to move slowest. Inbound calls attributed to "found you on ChatGPT" or "saw you on AI search" rose from zero to 11 per month.
How Vimub helps
Free AI Visibility audit — see your score in 60 seconds.
Tell us your business and your city. We'll run the 25-prompt scan across all 5 engines and email you the score with the specific gaps. No card needed, no upsell pressure — just the number and what's behind it. Run my free audit.
What this means for the next 12 months
Google AI Overviews coverage will keep expanding — we expect it to answer 50%+ of queries by end of 2026. ChatGPT and Claude will both deepen their live-web integration. The businesses that get into the engines' answer set in the next 12 months will compound a structural advantage that the late movers will struggle to undo. The optimisation work isn't dramatic — citations, schema, real reviews on the right platforms, content that names the locality. But it has to happen now, not after your competitors have done it.
How Vimub helps
Vimub runs the 25-prompt AI Visibility scan every Monday morning, against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AIO, in your locale and your language. We track citations, sentiment and rank, and we surface the specific gaps that are stopping each engine from naming you. No other UK reputation platform does this. Start a free audit — see your current score before you do anything else.