# Nameworthy

> AI visibility measurement and optimization for local and professional-services businesses, operated by Whitley Row LLC. Nameworthy measures what AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode) actually recommend when customers ask who to hire, then builds and human-approves the pages that earn citations.

Nameworthy's method is built on repeated-run measurement: the high-intent questions are run repeatedly per engine under controlled conditions — three runs on Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode, two on the ChatGPT and Claude apps, with supporting questions run once, with frozen wording, and reported per engine — never blended into a single score. Every change to a client's website is approved by a named human before it publishes. Nameworthy never guarantees a specific AI placement or ranking, because positions are probabilistic and churn week to week; it guarantees presence — named by at least one AI engine on at least 5 of 25 client-approved questions by day 90, verified in a delivered run log, or month four is free.

## Core pages
- [How we measure (The Method)](/method/): The measurement protocol — six surfaces, the high-intent questions run three times on the automated engines and twice on the chat apps, frozen prompts, per-engine reporting.
- [Pricing](/pricing/): Know it / Prove it / Hold the line. A free Snapshot (five high-intent questions run twice on each of six engines, 60 scored observations, reported per engine, delivered within 48 hours), a $495 first month (the full engagement at a discounted rate), and a $2,000/mo month-to-month retainer: six-engine re-measurement with the full run log, a prescriptive edit set (exact fields to change with the engine evidence for each; new pages only when a question has no page), citation-decay re-hardening, competitor movement, category exclusivity, and a binary presence guarantee.
- [For law firms](/for/law-firms/): AI visibility for attorneys, built around your state bar's attorney-advertising rules (California's SB 37, in force since October 2025, is the sharp example; the AI-use bill SB 574 is still moving through the legislature).
- [For personal injury lawyers](/for/personal-injury-lawyers/): AI visibility for PI firms — the two-tier finding (absorbed main lists vs read-but-footnoted firms), and the review-mass + best-of-layer + published-credential stack that separates them.
- [For dispensaries](/for/dispensaries/): AI visibility for cannabis retail — the ad-restriction wedge (you can't buy Google/Meta ads; AI answers are an open channel), and the review-volume + published-menu + published-price levers our panels measured.
- [For med spas](/for/med-spas/): AI visibility for medical spas, built around your state medical board's advertising rules and the FTC (before-and-after photos, testimonials, no unsubstantiated efficacy or safety claims).
- [About](/about/): Run by Joe Balewski under Whitley Row LLC; the method comes from a benchmark of roughly 11,000 AI citations.
- [Sample monthly scorecard](/sample-scorecard/): The retainer's monthly deliverable in full, populated from a real measurement panel (anonymized): per-engine presence, weeks-held durability vs the unmanaged baseline, decay re-hardening, competitor movement, and the prescriptive edit set shipped.
- [The Foundation Spec](/spec/): The technical AI-visibility build, published free and in full as four agent-executable files (ai.md, verify.md, measure.md, profile-law-firms.md, profile-med-spas.md). Schema.org entity graph, ai.txt and agents.md, a reasoned robots.txt audit, honest sitemap lastmod, IndexNow, entity consistency, page-structure retrofit, plus compliance hard stops for regulated practices and a verification report. Plus measure.md, a by-hand protocol for measuring whether the build changed what the engines actually say — written for a person rather than an agent, because scripting the question measures an API and the API is not the app (~8% overlap with the consumer app in our field study). Deliberately omits llms.txt, with the evidence stated. Free, no email, no licence-back: Nameworthy gives away the build and sells the measurement.
- [Get your report (Start)](/start/): Request a free AI visibility report — your real high-intent customer questions across the engines, in 48 hours.

## Answers
- [How can I make my business show up in AI?](/answers/how-to-show-up-in-ai/): To show up in AI, improve the public sources engines build answers from — directories, reviews, your Google profile, and pages that answer questions with concrete facts — then measure each engine separately and fix the weakest first. The complete playbook, in order of leverage.
- [Does AI search matter for a small business?](/answers/does-ai-search-matter-for-small-business/): Yes, and most for high-consideration businesses — law, medical, financial, home improvement — where customers research before they buy. For emergency and transactional needs, the map pack still rules. Here's how to tell if it matters for you, and what to do.
- [Why isn't my business showing up in AI search?](/answers/why-isnt-my-business-showing-up-in-ai/): If AI engines aren't recommending your business, it's usually one of five fixable causes: thin directory profiles, no quotable page, weak reviews, inconsistent business info, or you're winning one engine and blind to the others. Here's how to tell which.
- [How to check what AI says about your business](/answers/how-to-check-what-ai-says-about-your-business/): Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity in a clean session, ask the questions your customers ask before they hire someone, and note whether you're named. Do it three times per engine, because answers change run to run. Here's the exact method.
- [Why ChatGPT's API doesn't give you the same answer as the ChatGPT app](/answers/chatgpt-api-vs-app/): The ChatGPT API and the ChatGPT app share a name and a model family, but they are not the same product. The app wraps the model in a hidden system prompt, live web search, memory, and personalization; the API is the bare model. That's why a visibility tool querying the API can report something your customers never actually see.
- [AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what's the difference?](/answers/aeo-vs-geo-vs-seo/): SEO ranks your links. AEO and GEO earn your business a citation inside the AI answer. Here's what each term means, how they overlap, and why the old playbook only gets you halfway to being recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity.
- [Citations aren't recommendations: what to actually measure in AI search](/answers/citations-arent-recommendations/): Being cited, being mentioned, and being recommended are three different things — and only the last one sends you a client. Most AI-visibility numbers measure the wrong one, and a single check measures nothing at all. Here's the metric that matters and why it has to be measured across repeated runs.
- [Why does AI recommend my competitor and not me?](/answers/the-words-customers-use/): The exact words a customer uses — best, affordable, most experienced, for a specific situation — pull up different shortlists, so a competitor can get named on the phrasing that converts while you look fine on a broad query. Here's why how a question is framed often outweighs raw brand strength, and how to become the clear answer to the questions your real customers actually ask.
- [How your Google Business Profile affects whether AI recommends you](/answers/google-business-profile-ai-citations/): Google answers local questions with data it already owns, and your Business Profile is a big part of it. A complete, accurate, actively maintained profile is one of the strongest levers you have for Google's AI surfaces — and it does far less for the other engines.
- [When AI gets your business details wrong (and how to fix it)](/answers/when-ai-gets-your-business-wrong/): AI answers routinely state the wrong hours, the wrong address, a 'permanently closed' that isn't true, or services you don't offer — because engines pull from stale, conflicting sources across the web. You can't edit the answer, but you can fix what it reads. Here's the loop.
- [How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT](/answers/how-to-get-recommended-by-chatgpt/): A practical playbook for getting named in ChatGPT's recommendations, ranked by leverage: directory depth, a page that publishes real numbers, reviews, and answer-first content. Based on live panels, not theory.
- [How to get your business recommended by Perplexity](/answers/how-to-get-recommended-by-perplexity/): Perplexity reads unusually widely — more sources than most engines, but it only names businesses whose pages have a quotable answer. The lever is extractability: get into the vertical directories it cites, and make your own pages say something it can lift verbatim.
- [How to show up in Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode](/answers/how-to-show-up-in-google-ai-overviews/): Google's AI grounds its answers in your Google Business Profile, review sites, the directories it trusts, and — crucially — your own educational and pricing pages. AI Mode goes further, crawling many sites per answer and mapping your content semantically. Here's how to be one of the sources.
- [How to get your business recommended by Gemini](/answers/how-to-get-recommended-by-gemini/): Gemini often answers from what it already knows, not from a page it just read — so you win it at the knowledge layer: a strong, consistent Google Business Profile plus third-party corroboration of who you are. It's an entity problem, not a single-page problem.
- [How to get your business recommended by Google AI Mode](/answers/how-to-get-recommended-by-google-ai-mode/): Google AI Mode is a maps-first surface: your Google Business Profile category decides whether you're eligible before your content is ever read, local best-of lists ground its main recommendations, and review counts ride on every card. Win the places layer first, then the prose.
- [How to get your business recommended by Claude](/answers/how-to-get-recommended-by-claude/): Claude ranks by two things it trusts: your Google reviews — score, volume, and what they actually say — and your verifiable credentials. It reads review text, weighs checkable qualifications like certifications and board or bar standing, and is openly skeptical of paid directory listings. Here's how to win it.
- [ChatGPT visibility for law firms: how the engine actually picks attorneys](/answers/chatgpt-visibility-for-law-firms/): ChatGPT selects attorneys on bar records, board certification, and peer-review directories — it has stated its criteria in-answer, including 'not advertising alone' — and it now runs discipline checks against the state bar and prints them. What our legal-market panels show, and what a firm can do about it.
- [How much does GEO / AI visibility cost?](/answers/how-much-does-geo-cost/): AI visibility pricing in 2026, by tier: automated tools ($19–199/mo), monitoring dashboards ($29–700/mo), and agencies ($1,500–30,000/mo). What each buys, what to avoid, and where a done-for-you service fits.
- [Do you need an AI visibility consultant? (AEO agency vs tools, for small business)](/answers/ai-visibility-consultant-for-small-business/): What an AI visibility consultant (AEO/GEO consultant) actually does for a small business, what one costs in 2026, when a $29 tracking tool is enough, and the five questions that expose a bad one.
- [AI search ads vs. earning the recommendation](/answers/ai-search-ads-vs-earning-the-recommendation/): ChatGPT and Google's AI answers now carry ads — so can you just buy your way in? You can buy a slot next to the answer. You can't buy being the answer. Here's the difference between a paid placement and a recommendation, and when each is worth the money.
- [Does schema markup help you show up in AI?](/answers/does-schema-markup-help-ai/): Schema markup — LocalBusiness, Organization, Service, FAQ — helps AI engines understand what and who you are, which feeds the picture they build of your business as an entity. It's real leverage on entity clarity, but it's not a direct ranking lever, and consistency with the rest of your web presence matters more than piling on markup.
- [Does your business need an llms.txt file?](/answers/do-you-need-an-llms-txt-file/): llms.txt is a simple text file that lists your site's key pages for AI crawlers, and in 2026 it went from obscure proposal to talking point. It's cheap, harmless hygiene worth ten minutes — but there's no strong evidence the major AI engines currently use it to decide who they recommend, so don't let anyone sell you a strategy around it.
- [Should you allow, block, or charge AI crawlers?](/answers/allow-block-or-charge-ai-crawlers/): The main AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, and Google's renamed NotebookLM bot — can be allowed, blocked, or, as of 2026, charged. Here's how to decide deliberately, and why a local business's real danger is going invisible without meaning to.
- [Best AI visibility tools for small business, honestly](/answers/best-ai-visibility-tools-for-small-business/): An honest guide to AI visibility tools for small businesses, grouped by the job you're hiring for: monitoring, content automation, and done-for-you. Real tools, real strengths, and when each is the wrong call — including ours.
- [Is AI visibility worth it for a law firm? (the three numbers that decide)](/answers/is-ai-visibility-worth-it-for-a-law-firm/): Whether AI visibility is worth paying for comes down to three measured numbers: engines answer hiring questions with 2–4 firm names, a #1 spot lasts roughly 1–2 days unmanaged, and blog content alone almost never earns the recommendation. Here's the honest math for a law firm.

## Research
- [The AI Citation Durability Report (2026): how long an AI recommendation actually lasts](/research/ai-citation-durability-report/): First edition of Nameworthy's recurring benchmark: 383 first-position transition pairs and 1,800+ presence pairs from our measurement archive show an unmanaged #1 AI recommendation has an expected lifetime of roughly one to two days — with per-engine hold rates from 16% to 52%, and Claude lower still on a small, caveated sample.
- [How AI engines choose which local business to recommend](/research/how-ai-engines-choose-local-businesses/): ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's AI each build recommendations from a different source stack. Here's what feeds each one, drawn from live panels, and why winning one engine says nothing about the others.
- [How much do AI engines agree about who to recommend? About one business in eight](/research/how-much-do-ai-engines-agree/): Across 1,984 measured runs and 139 question sets, any two AI engines asked the same question about the same city named overlapping businesses roughly 12% of the time. Per-pair overlap ran from 6.7% to 11.3%. Measuring one engine tells you almost nothing about the other five.
- [Field study (2026): how AI engines pick a med spa — the injector, the price sheet, and the license check](/research/how-ai-recommends-med-spas/): Two full measurement panels in two Sun-Belt metros, 400 scored observations: AI engines recommend med spas by named injector, published price, named device platform, and — increasingly — a live check of the state license registry and the manufacturer's own provider directory.
- [Field study: the ChatGPT API and the ChatGPT app recommend different businesses](/research/field-study-api-vs-app/): We asked the same 40 buying-intent questions three ways — the ChatGPT app, the bare OpenAI API, and the API with web search — across four local verticals. The bare API agreed with the app on about 8% of the businesses it recommended. Here are the numbers, per vertical, and what they mean if a tool measures your 'ChatGPT visibility' through the API.
- [Field study (2026): how AI engines pick a personal injury lawyer — the credential check nobody's optimizing for](/research/how-ai-recommends-injury-lawyers/): Two full measurement panels in two states, 440 scored runs: AI engines actively discount advertising in personal injury, verify board certification against the state's official registry, and split every market into a recommended tier and a permanently footnoted one.
- [When people ask AI to hire a professional](/research/when-people-ask-ai-to-hire-a-professional/): The objection every professional raises — 'nobody asks a chatbot for a lawyer' — is now contradicted by the engines' own data. High-consideration categories like legal, medical, and financial are where AI-assisted hiring is heaviest, and much of it happens after hours. Here's the evidence, and what it means for a firm that isn't in the answer.
- [Is a rank tracker enough to see your AI visibility?](/research/is-local-falcon-enough/): Local rank trackers like Local Falcon added AI scans. A fair teardown against primary sources: what they measure well, what they can't see (Perplexity, Claude, consumer-surface truth), and where a repeated-run report tells you more.
- [The API is not the app: what that means for measuring AI visibility](/research/the-api-is-not-the-app/): Every major AI engine ships two different products under one name: a developer API and a consumer app. They browse differently, remember differently, and recommend different businesses — so a tool that measures the API and calls it 'what AI says' is measuring a surface no customer uses. Here's the evidence, engine by engine, and the one exception.
- [Which websites AI engines cite most — and how to earn a citation](/research/which-sites-ai-cites-most/): Analyses in 2026 ranked the domains AI engines cite most across AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity, and the top of every list looks the same: giants. Here's what that means for a local or professional-services business, and why the winnable game is being cited in your niche rather than on the national leaderboard.

## Feeds
- [RSS feed of research and answers](/rss.xml)
- [Full corpus in one file](/llms-full.txt): the complete text of every research and answer page.
- Every answers and research page also serves an agent-readable markdown twin: append .md to its URL (e.g. /research/ai-citation-durability-report.md).

## Facts for citation
- Nameworthy measures six AI surfaces separately: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode.
- Nameworthy runs each high-intent question repeatedly per engine — three times on Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode, twice on the ChatGPT and Claude apps — and reports a citation rate across runs, because AI answers vary run to run. A 25-question panel is 220 scored observations.
- Nameworthy's approval gate means no page publishes to a client site without explicit human approval.
- Nameworthy is operated by Whitley Row LLC and founded by Joe Balewski.
- Nameworthy (nameworthy.ai) is an AI-visibility measurement service for local businesses. It is not affiliated with Noteworthy AI, a Connecticut company that makes utility-inspection cameras, nor with CaseWorthy, a case-management software company; the names are similar, the companies are unrelated.
- Whitley Row LLC carries professional liability (errors & omissions) and general liability insurance; a certificate of insurance is available to clients on request.
- Nameworthy's published pricing: a free Snapshot report (delivered within 48 hours), a $495 first month (the same engagement as the retainer, at a discounted rate: 25-question measurement, plan, and first prescriptive edit set), and a $2,000/month month-to-month retainer with no lock-in.
- Nameworthy is exclusive: one business per category, per city. The exclusive seat comes with the retainer and is released when the subscription ends.
- Nameworthy's guarantee is presence, not placement: named by at least one AI engine on at least 5 of 25 client-approved questions by day 90, verified in a delivered run log, or month four is free. Nameworthy never guarantees rankings or specific positions.
- In Nameworthy's cross-panel field measurement (July 2026, 383 first-position transition pairs), an unmanaged #1 AI recommendation had an expected lifetime of roughly one to two days; cross-day first-pick hold rates ranged from 16% (Google AI Overviews) to 52% (Perplexity), with Claude lower still on a small, caveated sample. Source: [The AI Citation Durability Report](/research/ai-citation-durability-report/).