If your ideal customer pulls out their phone tonight and asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your category, what happens?
If you don't know the answer, you're not alone. Most small business owners have spent years optimizing for Google search rankings. They've built backlinks, written meta descriptions, claimed their Google Business Profile. And then the ground shifted. A growing share of purchase decisions now starts with a question typed into an AI assistant, not a search bar.
A consulting firm called Crescendo Consultants launched a free tool today that tries to make this problem measurable. It's called Sonar, and it checks whether five major AI engines -- ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity -- recommend your business when customers ask for one.
The answer, for most businesses, is no.
What the Tool Actually Does
Sonar runs the questions a real customer would type into an AI assistant, then analyzes the results across four areas:
AI Search Visibility: Which engines surface your business, and for which queries. This is the core question -- are you showing up at all?
Reputation signals: What your reviews are saying, analyzed across a 21-category sentiment model. AI assistants pull heavily from review platforms when deciding what to recommend, and the signals they weight are not identical to what Google weights.
Competitive positioning: How you compare to others in your category who are getting recommended. Knowing you're invisible is less useful than knowing why your competitor is visible and you're not.
Technical foundation: Whether your site and data infrastructure support AI discoverability -- things like structured data, consistent NAP (name, address, phone) information across directories, and whether your business information is being correctly ingested by the major AI engines.
The analysis is free. Crescendo says it's surfaced more than $15 million in growth opportunities and flagged over $20 million in operational inefficiencies across businesses that have used it so far.
Why This Matters Right Now
The shift from search to AI recommendations has been gradual enough that many businesses haven't noticed it's already happening.
Google's AI Overview now appears at the top of search results for a wide range of queries. When someone searches for "best accountant for freelancers in Austin," the AI Overview gives a recommendation before any organic results. ChatGPT and Perplexity handle millions of similar queries daily. The businesses that get recommended in those answers aren't necessarily the ones with the best Google rankings. They're the ones with the right signals for AI systems -- reviews that emphasize specific attributes, consistent data across directories, and the kind of third-party validation that AI engines treat as trust signals.
For small businesses, the window to get ahead of this is narrowing. Early adoption of AI optimization -- whatever that eventually looks like as a formal discipline -- will likely follow the same pattern as early SEO: the businesses that figured it out in 2008 are still reaping the benefits.
What to Do With It
The Sonar tool is free and takes a business name, location, and category. The output is a report rather than a dashboard -- it tells you where you stand and what the highest-impact changes would be, not how to make those changes yourself.
That's worth noting. Crescendo is a consulting firm, and the free analysis is also a lead generation tool. That's fine -- the analysis itself appears to be genuinely useful -- but go in with clear eyes about what it is.
If you run a local service business, a restaurant, a retail shop, or any business where customers might ask an AI for a recommendation, this is worth 10 minutes of your time. The question of whether AI recommends your business is going from a curiosity to a real competitive factor. Right now, you can check for free.
Crescendo Consultants launched Sonar on June 12, 2026. The free AI visibility analysis is available at crescendo-consulting.net/sonar/demo. Source: ABNewswire via Financial Content.