I Asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity To Recommend a Web Developer in Cardiff

There's no getting away from it - AI is infiltrating every aspect of our lives - and this is getting more prevalent online with people increasingly turning to their favourite AI engine to find something out for them (there is only a hint of irony here that I asked Claude to get some data for me for this).

The numbers vary quite wildly, as I suppose this is quite a hard metric to really track (people are now getting recommendations inside their agent and no longer need to visit the site to make first contact), but the general consensus seems to be that while AI isn't replacing traditional search, it is rapidly increasing in popularity. Especially when you consider that Google's own AI summary box is now present on roughly 55% of searches, fewer and fewer people will start visiting your website and will instead rely on the suggested results.

One of my clients also spotted this as a trend the other week and they got in touch to ask me if I could help improve their AI visibility. It's something I'd been quite interested in so I did a load of research into how this might work and we agreed on a project scope. The first thing we would do would be to set a benchmark ranking of how likely an AI agent is to recommend their site by running 25 queries, 3 times each, against 5 AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. (Why 3 times? AI answers vary from one run to the next, so asking the same question repeatedly gives a much more reliable picture than a single snapshot.) We would then collect all of the data about who is getting recommended ahead of them, run an audit on their site with a crawler to find any potential pitfalls / issues with the content and then compare it with their competitors. Finally we would make all of the recommended changes and then re-scan the website in 6 weeks to see if their position has shifted.

Now the first part of that plan seems like a great benchmark to hold - 25 queries, 3 times each, against 5 AI platforms, that's just 375 times I'll need to run a query against an agent and collect the data back into a system - that'll only take me what, like 4 hours? OR we could build a little tool to automate, store and report on the data that we find - now that seems like a much better use of time! So that's what I did and so Mention Meter was born. Mention Meter runs a set of real-world questions against the major AI platforms, records who gets recommended, and audits your site for the issues that stop AI from understanding it.

The Self Audit

The work with that client is still ongoing, but it got me thinking I need to beef up my own online presence for AI, so let's run the tool on my own site - and while I'm disappointed with how I showed up, I'm not entirely surprised.

I showed up in just one single unbranded query (My WordPress site is slow and out of date. Who in Cardiff could rebuild it?) out of 17 unbranded queries, and across the rest I was invisible unless my brand name was mentioned. This includes things like:

• "Who builds Shopify e-commerce websites in Wales"
• "Can you recommend a WordPress developer in Cardiff who offers hosting and support"
• "Can you recommend a good web developer in Cardiff"

What made for even more depressing reading was that because I was originally trading under the name Glue Digital Studio, and have since dropped the "Digital" to become simply Glue Studio (no one ever used it and it was just a mouthful), by leaving references online to the full name I was confusing search results for people who might have been looking for me specifically. I do also have to perpetually compete with that plucky startup Amazon who named one of their data processing tools Glue Studio - but I think there's enough of a distinction between us that people won't get confused.

The audit also showed up some quick wins that I simply overlooked when building the site - correct structured data, descriptive alt text on case study logos and some technical hiccups that meant my content was garbled to machines when trying to process it (damn you UTF-8 character encoding!)

The Learnings

From doing both my own site and my client's site I've learned a fair amount about the world of GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation, essentially SEO for AI answers) and also SEO more broadly. Some of the things which you think are quite insignificant can actually turn out to be quite important going forwards. Like having two versions of your company name in multiple places will ultimately give AI reason to doubt itself - which will result in less confidence in recommending you above other companies who maybe have their act together.

Other issues flagged up on my client's site - for example in one place they were saying they had "over 10 years' experience", and in others they were saying they had "been operating since 2002" - now of course 2002 is more than 10 years ago. However in the eyes of an AI agent that is a confusing contradiction: "Is this company 24 years old or 10 years old? I'm not sure, and the person who asked me a question has asked for a well established firm - but I can't reliably state how well established these guys are, so I'll move on to the next ones."

Of course AI agents don't "think" - it's all algorithms and logic to find the best possible outcome, but what this means for us as humans who want to rely on this technology is that we need to make sure we give the best possible input so the machine will process the best possible output.

What's Next

I've now made all of the changes that were recommended by my tool, including:

• Consolidating my name to Glue Studio everywhere I could find the old one
• Adding correct structured data so machines can read who I am, where I am and what I do
• Writing descriptive alt text for the case study logos
• Fixing the character encoding issues that were garbling my content

I'm going to re-run the scan on my own website, as well as my client's site, in around 6 weeks to see how much of a difference it has made, and I'll post the results here when they come in. I'm also going to be keeping an eye on my overall Google Analytics and Google Search Console stats to see if these changes help out the humans as well as the robots for more organic SEO type activity.

If any of this has piqued your interest and you'd like to see how your website performs with the agents - drop me a message to alex@gluestudio.co.uk and we can set up a call so I can show you how Mention Meter works and what sort of improvements we could make to your site.