Most owners have never looked. It takes about twenty minutes, and the first look is usually the useful one.
Ask it the question a real customer would ask, not your business name. Phrase it the way a stranger would: who does this, who is good at it, what should I choose. Then note whether you are named, whether anyone is named at all, and where the information seems to come from. Look at what it says before you correct it.
Asking about your own name is the least useful test. Of course it can describe you. The question that matters is the one you are not in the answer to.
Because it is not reading the same thing you are.
A search engine gives you ten pages and lets you choose. An assistant reads what it can reach and writes a summary, and that summary has room for a handful of names at most. Often it names nobody, and answers from whatever it read about the category.
Two practical consequences follow. First, there is no page two to climb onto. Second, ranking first does not guarantee you get mentioned, because the assistant is summarising sources rather than ranking pages.
Four questions, run against whichever assistants your customers plausibly use. Type them fresh each time rather than reusing a thread, and use a normal account rather than a business one.
Write down what you get. Not the wording, the pattern: named or not, alone or among rivals, described accurately or vaguely. A screenshot of each is enough.
There are three outcomes, and they call for different work.
You are named, and described correctly. Nothing is broken. The work becomes guarding that position and checking that the description stays accurate as you change.
You are named, but badly. Wrong service, old pricing, a product you dropped. The assistant is repeating something it read. Fixing that means finding the page it is repeating and correcting the page, not arguing with the assistant.
You are absent. The most common result, and the least dramatic. It usually means the pages the assistant can read do not say clearly what you do and who for, in language a summary can lift.
Clear statements on your own pages, in the words people use, in a form that can be quoted.
In practice that means a plain sentence near the top of your homepage saying what you do and who you do it for. A page that answers the category question directly rather than assuming the reader already knows. Comparison pages, if you honestly have competitors customers ask about. And keeping those pages current, because an assistant repeating last year's service list is worse than one staying quiet.
What does not work: repeating your name more often, adding an FAQ that restates your marketing copy, or writing a page for every possible query in the hope one lands.
It cannot tell you how many customers you lose. Nobody can measure a sale that never started. It is a sample of a moving target, and a different day or a slightly different phrasing can produce a different answer.
That is why the useful habit is repetition rather than obsession. Check the same four questions once a month, note the pattern, and act on what changed.
Run the shortlist question. If you are not in the reply, open your homepage and read the first two sentences as if you were a stranger. If they do not say what you do and who for, that is the fix, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.
If you would rather not run it yourself, we do this every month and send you a written list of what to change first.
Monthly, $49. Cancel any time after the first month. The site build is a one-time $9 while the plan runs.