Think about the last time you walked down the cereal aisle. You didn’t weigh up every cereal made in Australia. You picked from what was on the shelf, and probably from the handful at eye level. If a brand isn’t stocked, it isn’t remembered, and it isn’t in the mix. Marketing professor Byron Sharp calls this physical availability, and in How Brands Grow it’s one of the two things that grow a brand.
AI search works the same way. Ask ChatGPT for a plumber in Parramatta or a bookkeeper in Ballarat and you don’t get ten blue links. You get a shortlist of three or four names. AI can only recommend what it can find and trust, and too many Australian small businesses aren’t on the shelf.
So we built a free AI visibility checker to help fix that.
The businesses with the least time are being left behind
Big businesses have teams for this. A head of SEO, an agency on retainer, someone whose whole job is working out how ChatGPT talks about the brand. Small businesses have the owner, at 9pm, once the books are done.
The research shows the gap:
- 44% of Australian SMEs reported some level of AI adoption in February 2026, and 19% said they simply don’t know how to use AI in their business (National AI Centre, Dec 2025 to Feb 2026).
- 22% of micro businesses aren’t using AI in any meaningful way, and 25% report no AI investment at all, compared with 5% of mid-market firms (Employment Hero SME Pulse with GWI, Apr to Jun 2026).
- 72% of mid-market businesses are increasing their AI spend, against 50% of micro businesses (same study).
Those numbers measure businesses using AI, not being found by it. But I’d argue it’s the same story. The businesses with the least time to pick up AI tools are often the ones whose website went up in 2019 and hasn’t been touched since. It’s not a lack of interest. It’s a lack of hours.
And that set-and-forget website is now one of the most important things a small business owns. It’s where AI goes to work out who you are, what you do and where you do it.
Everyone is asking AI
This isn’t a niche of early adopters. It’s every kind of customer:
- Shoppers: 75% of Australians use AI search to help make purchase decisions (WPP Media, Aug 2026).
- Travellers: somewhere between 40% and 80% of travellers worldwide now use AI to plan trips, depending on whose numbers you read (Accenture 2025; Phocuswright 2025).
- Business buyers: 51% of B2B buyers start their research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google (G2, global, Apr 2026).
The café, the tour operator and the IT consultant are all in the same aisle now. Ignore it and you’re not on the shelf.
Why we built it
We wanted a simple, free way for Australian small and medium businesses to get the foundations right for AI search. No jargon, no price tag, no 40-page report that ends in a sales call.
There are plenty of AI visibility and answer engine optimisation (AEO) tools out there, but most are generic and global. They’ll tell you whether a crawler can read your homepage. They won’t tell you whether AI can see you’re a real Australian business. Ours checks the local signals too: your ABN, your address with state and postcode, and an Australian phone number people can tap to call.
To be upfront about what it isn’t: it checks your website foundations. It doesn’t show who ranks above you, and it isn’t everything AI looks at. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your press all count too (we covered those in our Business NSW webinar). But your website is the one part you fully control, so it’s the right place to start.
How the AI visibility checker works
Pop in your URL (or a competitor’s). In about a minute it scans up to 10 public pages against a 25-point checklist, and you don’t need to sign up to see your results.
Each of the five areas below gets a score out of 10 and a rating of Strong, Alright or Poor. Your total out of 100 is the average of the areas it could check. The checks are fixed, so the same site gets the same score every time. AI only writes the plain-English summary.
Visible
Whether Google and AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are let in and can read your pages without JavaScript, one address per page, and a sitemap. If AI can’t get in, nothing else counts.
Clear
Page titles and descriptions, headings, enough words, image alt text and pages that link to each other. AI can only quote what you’ve clearly said.
Trustworthy
HTTPS, no broken links, your ABN, an about page and signs the site is kept up to date. AI favours businesses that look real and current.
Speedy
Google PageSpeed on your homepage, including load time, layout shift, page weight and how well it fits a phone screen. Slow sites lose people, and they signal a site nobody’s looking after.
Local
Business details AI can read, your address with state and postcode, and an Australian phone number people can tap to call.
This is the bit generic tools miss, and it’s the part we cared about most. When someone asks AI for a bookkeeper near them, it has to work out two things: where you are, and whether you’re the real deal. That’s local trust, and it comes from details that line up. The same business name, address and phone number on your site as everywhere else online, written as text AI can read rather than tucked inside an image.
Australia has its own versions of those signals. There’s a Newcastle in NSW and one in England, and a Perth in WA and one in Scotland, so a state and postcode tells AI which one you mean. An Australian number people can tap to call says you’re local and easy to reach. Your ABN, which we check under Trustworthy, shows you’re a registered Australian business. A global tool won’t look for any of that. Ours does.
Your scorecard
There are bonus checks too, like a services page, an llms.txt file or a .au domain. They show “Not yet” when they’re missing and never change your score.
What to do with your results
- Do it yourself. Some fixes are quick wins, like a missing page title or alt text on a few images. Work through the checklist and start with the areas rated Poor.
- Pass it to your agency or in-house team. Send them the scorecard. It’s a ready-made brief.
- Get a local freelancer on it. Speed, SEO structure and broken builds usually need someone who does this every day. Unjumble has 1,500+ local, ABN-connected Australian freelancers across 170+ services, including generative engine optimisation (GEO), SEO, local SEO and web design. It’s free to sign up and post a gig. Local freelancers pop in a bid, and you compare and pick.
Back in the cereal aisle, nobody buys the box that isn’t on the shelf. Make sure you’re on it.