Articles · November 2026
Try this tonight: ask your own assistant about your business
Here is a test that costs nothing, takes five minutes, and tells you more about your business’s future than a month of marketing reports. Tonight, open whichever assistant you already have — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, the one on your phone — and talk to it the way a customer would.
The five-minute test
First, ask for your trade, not your name: “Who’s a good [plumber / salon / bakery] near [your town]?” See who gets named. Then ask about yourself directly: “Tell me about [your business]. What do they offer, what are their hours, what do people say about them?” Finally, try to act: “Can you book me in for Thursday?” — and watch what happens.
The three ways it goes wrong
Invisible. You simply don’t come up. The assistant names your competitors with total confidence, and as far as its owner is concerned, your business does not exist.
Wrong. You come up — described with last year’s hours, services you dropped, or prices you no longer charge. A human visitor might forgive a stale website. An assistant repeats the error to every customer who asks, in a tone of complete certainty.
Dead end. The assistant finds you and describes you beautifully — and then can do nothing. No way to hold a slot, no way to send a request. The customer’s momentum dies at the exact moment they were ready to buy.
Why this test matters
Nothing about the test is hypothetical — it is what your customers’ assistants are reporting about you today, whether you ever look or not. The only choice the test leaves you is whether you find out from your own phone, or from a slow season. And if you didn’t love what you found: that gap — findable, readable, bookable — is exactly what a Scorecard measures, across all the major assistants, in writing.