How do I check if my business shows up in AI search?

Pick a set of 15–30 questions a real customer would ask — like "best [your service] in [your town]" — and run them through ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity yourself, noting when you get named and when a competitor shows up instead. Repeat it monthly, because the answers change, and the gaps are your to-do list for getting cited.

There's no dashboard that reports your "AI ranking" the way rank trackers do for Google, so the reliable method is to check the engines directly and keep a simple log. Start by writing the questions a buyer actually types — not your service names, but the real phrasing, including your town or region, comparison questions ("X vs Y"), and problem-first questions ("my phone keeps going to voicemail, what do I do"). Run each one through the engines that matter — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity — and record three things: whether you were named, whether you were cited with a link, and who showed up if you didn't. Do it from a logged-out or incognito session so your own history doesn't skew the result, and repeat it on a schedule, because these answers are regenerated constantly and a mention today isn't permanent. The pattern in that log tells you what to fix: if competitors keep appearing for a question you should own, the page answering it is either missing, buried, or not written answer-first. This running check is exactly what a visibility audit formalizes — if you'd rather not run it yourself, the free AI visibility audit does this pass across the engines for your real buyer questions and hands back the gaps.

Answered by Alex Rivera, Founder · Updated October 26, 2026