This month we teamed up with Business NSW to run “Is ChatGPT recommending your competitors?”, a live member webinar on how small and medium businesses get recommended by AI.
266 businesses signed up, one of Business NSW’s biggest educational webinar sign-ups this year. Dan Macias, General Manager, Membership, Strategy & Partnerships at Business NSW, kicked things off. Our founder Zac Kelly presented alongside Nathan Broadbridge, Founder of Polar Web Agency and a freelancer on Unjumble. One attendee called it “one of the most useful webinars from Business NSW at the moment”. We’ll take that.
The short version
Your customers are asking AI first. 75% of Australians already use AI search to help make purchase decisions (WPP Media, Aug 2026). AI doesn’t hand back ten blue links. It gives a shortlist of three or four names, and if you’re not on it, you’re invisible.
AI recommends businesses it can find, trust and quote. In the session we broke that down into six focus areas. The first three are your core assets. The last three back them up.
- Your website: it’s AI’s main source for local recommendations. Give it one page per service and location, a FAQ, and settings that let AI crawlers in.
- Your Google Business Profile: fill in every field, post monthly updates, keep your photos fresh and reply to every review.
- Your socials: use the same name and details everywhere, link back to your site, and write captions that name the service and suburb.
- Fresh information: AI favours recently updated pages, so add “last updated” dates and refresh your top pages every few months.
- PR and press: most of what AI cites is earned media, not ads. Association newsletters, local news, awards and podcasts all count.
- The free tools: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics help AI find you and show you the traffic it sends.
The best part: you can make a real start this afternoon, for free, in about an hour.
- Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity who they’d recommend for your service near you.
- Fill in every field of your Google Business Profile, add fresh photos and reply to recent reviews.
- Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap.
Big businesses already have teams on this. Most small businesses haven’t started yet, and that’s the window.
What our free AI visibility checker looks at
The quickest way to see where your website stands is our free AI visibility checker. Pop in your URL (or a competitor’s) and in about a minute it scans up to 10 public pages against a 25-point checklist. You don’t need to sign up to see your results.
It scores five areas, each out of 10 and rated Strong, Alright or Poor:
- Visible: whether Google and AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are let in and can read your pages, and whether you have a sitemap.
- Clear: page titles and descriptions, headings, enough words on the page, image alt text and pages that link to each other.
- Trustworthy: HTTPS, no broken links, your ABN, an about page and signs the site is kept up to date.
- Speedy: Google PageSpeed on your homepage, including load time and how well it fits a phone screen.
- Local: business details AI can read, your address with state and postcode, and an Australian phone number people can tap to call.
Your total out of 100 is the average of those areas. The checks are fixed, so the same site gets the same score every time. AI only writes the plain-English summary. It covers the website foundations you need to show up in AI, which makes it a good starting point for the six focus areas, not the whole picture. Here’s why we built it.
Get a local freelancer on it
Some fixes are quick wins you can sort yourself, like a missing page title or a few images without alt text. Others, like site speed, SEO structure or new photos, are better handed to someone who does it every day. That’s where Unjumble comes in.
- Post a gig for free: say what you need, whether that’s fixing your audit results, building service and location pages or a few months of social content.
- Compare bids from local freelancers: choose from 1,500+ ABN-connected Australian freelancers across 170+ services, including generative engine optimisation (GEO), SEO, local SEO, web design, social media and photography.
- Run the job in one place: chat, share files and pay through Stripe, stage by stage. Each payment goes to the freelancer once you sign off that stage.
Business NSW members pay no platform fee on their first three gigs. Post a gig on Unjumble to get started.
Thanks for having us
A big thank you to Dan and the Business NSW team for hosting, to Nathan for bringing the hands-on know-how, and to everyone who showed up with questions.
Want the full breakdown, with all six pillars, the stats behind them and the easy wins? Zac has written it up for myBusiness, so keep an eye out for it there.
About Business NSW
Business NSW is the state’s peak business organisation, backing business in New South Wales since 1826. Now in its 200th year, it advocates for over 90,000 member businesses at a local, state and federal level. For small and medium businesses, that means a voice in government, research like its quarterly Business Conditions Survey, practical advice, and more than 270 events a year to learn and connect with other businesses.