When someone asks an AI for a business like yours, does it name you?
Customers increasingly ask an assistant instead of searching. Those answers are built from your listings, your reviews, and your competitors’ — and almost no small business has ever seen what they actually say. We’ll point Footprint at your market and send you the read. Free, once, no pitch attached.
Two fields and a competitor name.
That’s everything we need. No account, no card, no call booked before you’ve seen anything.
Whether AI assistants name you — or a rival — for the questions your customers actually ask
Your seven category scores, computed by rubric, not opinion
The same scores for the competitors you named — side by side
The specific gaps behind the gap, ranked by what would move first
A person runs this. Footprint does the reading and the scoring — about fifteen public sources per business, seven scored categories — and then Greg reviews the output before it reaches you, the same as every client audit. That’s why it takes a day or two instead of thirty seconds, and it’s why the number you get is one we’ll stand behind.
Three steps. None of them are automatic.
You send two fields.
Business name and the area you serve. A competitor name if you have one in mind — and if you don’t, finding out who you actually compete with online is frequently the most useful part of the whole exercise.
Footprint reads the market.
It crawls your site and each competitor’s, unifies roughly fifteen public sources per business into one canonical record — listings, reviews, search visibility, ad transparency, page performance — and scores every business across seven categories weighted to your industry.
A person checks it, then sends it.
Machine-found competitors and data conflicts route through a review queue before anything reaches you. You get a read a human has confirmed. No staff displaced — the machine gathers, a person judges.
Why does AI visibility matter for a small business?
Because the recommendation now happens before the search does. When a customer asks an assistant for “a good painter near me” or “the best breakfast in town,” they get a short list — usually a handful of names — rather than a page of links to compare. If you are not on that short list, you are not in the running, and unlike a search ranking there is no page two to be found on. Most owners have never checked whether they appear at all.
The uncomfortable part is that these answers are assembled from sources you mostly don’t control and may never have looked at: directory listings that disagree with each other, reviews you haven’t replied to, an old address, a competitor who answers questions publicly and therefore gets quoted. The assistant is not making a judgment about who is better at the work. It is summarizing the public record. When that record is thin or contradictory, you get skipped — and nothing tells you it happened.
That is the whole reason this check exists. You cannot fix a record you have never read.
A worked example of the same idea, run on ourselves: we audited blackfrog.ai with Footprint and it scored 47.6 out of 100 — one organic keyword, no AI-assistant citations, and nine pages under 150 words. We published the number and started fixing it. If we ran the check on our own house and didn’t like the answer, you can assume we’ll give you yours straight.
Common questions
Is this really free?
Yes, once per business, and there is no card and no call required to get it. It costs us a Footprint run and some of Greg’s review time. We do it because a scored read of your own market is the most honest possible advertisement for what the product does — and because roughly nobody says no to seeing their own numbers.
What will you do with my email?
Send you the read, and follow up once to ask if it was useful. If you want more after that, you’ll say so. We don’t sell or share the list, and there’s no drip sequence waiting to fire at you.
How is this different from an SEO audit?
A traditional audit grades your website. This grades your market — you and your competitors on the same rubric, from the same sources, including the surface most audits ignore entirely: whether AI assistants name you when someone asks. The output isn’t a list of technical warnings; it’s where you stand against the businesses you actually compete with.
Do I need to be a customer, or become one?
No. The check is the check. If it turns up something worth doing that you can do yourself, do it yourself — several of the highest-impact fixes (replying to reviews, correcting a listing) cost nothing but an afternoon and we’ll say so plainly in the read.
How long does it take?
One to two business days. It would be faster if a machine sent it unreviewed, but then it would be a machine’s opinion rather than a checked one, and checking is the part we actually sell.
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