Measurement & Reporting · 8 min read · September 25, 2026 · Hafsa Tariq, gaash.ai
Are you on the bid list? An afternoon's AI check for cleaning companies
Set aside one afternoon, save today's copies of your own pages, and put six questions a facility manager might ask before inviting bids to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Read every answer against those saved pages: who was named, for what scope, from which source. Each wrong answer points at a page to fix. The result is one day's snapshot, not a trend.
Six questions from before the bid invitations go out
Before a facility or property manager sends out a request for proposal, someone draws up the list of contractors to invite. If that someone asks an assistant, the questions might read as the six below do. We have not measured what facility managers type, so treat these as a start and swap in the phrases from your own bid invitations, walk-throughs and first calls, keeping the brackets for size, building and place.
- commercial cleaning companies in [city] for an office of [size], five nights a week
- after hours janitorial service in [area] that cleans between [time] and [time]
- cleaning contractor for a [medical office, school or warehouse] in [city]
- who does post construction cleaning for a [building type] in [city] before handover
- insured commercial cleaning company in [city] with background checked staff
- is [company name] a good cleaning contractor for offices in [city]
The first five are asked by someone who has not heard of you yet. The sixth tests what an answer says once someone has your name, perhaps from a referral or a van in a parking lot.
Save the pages the answers will be held against
An answer is judged against what your site said on the day, not what you meant it to say, so capture that first. Save or print the services page, each commercial service page, the areas page, the page that states insurance and vetting, the contact page and your Business Profile, and write the date on the folder.
Beside them, write one sheet of what is true today: the services you sell and the ones you stopped, the building types and the largest size you take, the hours your crews work, the towns you cover, the cover and certifications you hold as issued, and how you price. The facts a buyer expects each page to carry are listed on the cleaning companies overview.
Each answer then gets two rounds of fact-checking: against the sheet and against the saved pages. Where the sheet and the pages already disagree, you have found your first fix before asking anything.
Running the questions: a new conversation each time, sources kept
Put each question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and start a new conversation every time so that no earlier answer sits in front of the next one. Where the product offers web search as a setting, note whether it was on. Paste each answer in full into one document with the assistant, the date and the time, and copy every link or source citation it lists; those are what you will trace.
Before the six, run the first question three times on one assistant. If the three lists differ, you have seen for yourself why a single afternoon is a snapshot, and you will read the other answers with that in mind.
What to compare in each answer, and against which page
| In the answer | Hold it against | A wrong reading |
|---|---|---|
| Whether you are named, and where | Your name as the site writes it | Absent while three competitors are named; named last, as an aside |
| The service attached to you | The services page and the sheet of what is true | A service you stopped selling, or a house-cleaning description on a commercial question |
| The building types and size | Each commercial service page | "Small offices only" when you take [size]; a building type you do not clean |
| The schedule | The crew hours on your service pages | Daytime only, when your crews work nights |
| The area | The areas page and the Business Profile's service area | A town you left, or the city of a company with a similar name |
| Insurance, vetting, certifications | The page that states them, and the documents themselves | A cover you do not hold, or a certificate that has expired |
| The price or its basis | The price line on each service page | An hourly rate when you price per month, or a figure you have never quoted |
| The sources listed | Nothing: write every one down | Mostly directories and marketplaces, and none of your own pages |
Write the readings as one line per answer, next to the pasted text. At the end of the afternoon a column of short verdicts is quicker to scan than twenty-four answers in full.
Which wrong answers cost you a bid, and where each one starts
A wrong answer about your company is useful, because someone wrote the wrong sentence somewhere and you can go looking for it. Where the answer lists its sources, open each one and search the page for the wrong phrase. Where it lists none, search your own site, your Business Profile and the directories you appear on for the same words. The table gives the first places to look.
| The wrong answer | Look first at | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| A service you no longer sell | An old service page still live, a directory category, an old post or press mention | Take the old page down, or say on it that the service has ended; correct the directory category |
| A house cleaner, on a commercial question | A homepage and about page that describe homes only; a marketplace profile that lists you under house cleaning | Name your commercial services and building types on the homepage, and give each a page |
| The wrong building type or size | Service pages that never say which buildings, or up to what size | State the building types and the size you are set up for on each commercial page |
| Daytime only, or no after-hours work | Office hours on the site with no crew hours beside them | State crew hours on each service page, labeled apart from office hours |
| The wrong area, or another company's city | The profile's service area, an old areas page, a directory with an old address, a company with a similar name | Make the areas page, the profile and the listings agree, as stating the area you cover sets out |
| Insurance or a certificate you do not hold | A directory profile, an old version of your insurance page, a template you copied | Correct it the same day: your own page first, then every listing that repeats it |
| An hourly rate, or a price you never quoted | An old price page, a marketplace's default rate, a review that mentions a price | State your basis and a dated range on the service page |
Some wrong answers lead nowhere you can find. They may come from an older copy of a page, a site you have not come across, or what the model learned from its training data. Record them, fix what you can reach, and look again next month. How to correct a page you cannot edit, and what an assistant's operator does and does not let you do, is in when AI gets facts about your business wrong.
Being left out of the AI recommendation altogether is a result rather than a fact to trace. Read the pages cited for the companies that were named and list what they state that yours do not: building types, crew hours, insurance, a price basis. Those are the sentences to write first.
What an afternoon shows, and what only a monthly reading can
An afternoon is one run of six questions on one day. Answers can vary from run to run, which the three-run test at the start lets you see, so a single sitting cannot tell a change from noise. It finds wrong facts and missing pages; it cannot show whether a fix worked. That is the monthly panel's job, with fixed lines, three runs per assistant, and commercial and residential read apart, as AI visibility for cleaning companies sets out.
Our own large reading has the same limit, and we label it that way. In our audit, one buyer question per business went to Claude once, with web retrieval on, and 14.9% of 9,240 businesses were named. It covers 40 trades with no cleaning-only cut, and it is a direction, not a rate.
Google offers one more view. If your site is verified in Search Console, its generative AI performance report shows impressions of links to your pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, date and device. It has no query dimension, so it cannot say which question a facility manager asked, but it can show which of your pages appeared.
Common questions
How often should we repeat the afternoon check?
After a fix, rather than on a calendar. Run the same six questions a few weeks after you change a page to see whether the wrong fact still appears; the monthly panel is the schedule. Keep each afternoon's answers dated, so the next check is read against the last one and not against memory.
Which assistant do facility managers use?
We have not measured it, and we know of no published figure for facility managers. Ask the last few clients who signed with you where they first heard your name, and keep the answers. Until you know, run all four: our one large reading is a Claude figure and says nothing about ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity.
What do we do with the answers once the afternoon is over?
Keep them, dated, with the saved pages. The six questions can become the commercial lines of a monthly panel, and the wrong facts become a list of pages to change, each with the date you changed it. That list, and the pages as they stand after the changes, are what the next reading is held against.
Can someone run this check for us?
Yes. The free visibility check costs $0: give a website and an email, and within 48 hours a person sends a written result saying whether Claude names you, who it names instead, and what on your site stands in the way. The AI Visibility Audit, $490 one-time, adds a fixed panel and the pages each answer drew on.
Sources
The probe figure is this site's own: one question per business, put to Claude once, across 40 trades with no cleaning-only cut. What Search Console's report shows comes from Google's help page, linked where it is used.
Sources: our audit of 9,483 small-business sites, with its method · Search Console Help, generative AI performance report
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