More and more people skip the search results page entirely. They open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini, type a question like "what's the best invoicing tool for freelancers?", and pick one of the two or three names the answer gives them.
If your brand is not one of those names, you never even enter the race. The good news: you can find out where you stand in about thirty minutes, with nothing but a spreadsheet and a few AI assistants.
Step 1: write down the questions your customers actually ask
Forget keywords for a moment. AI assistants receive full questions, often with context. Write 15 to 20 of them, split into three groups:
- Discovery questions: "what tools help with X?", "how do small teams handle Y?"- Comparison questions: "X vs Y", "alternatives to Z", "is X worth it?"- Problem questions: the pain your product solves, phrased the way a frustrated person would type it.The best source for these is your own support inbox, sales calls and the questions people ask in communities. Copy their wording, not your marketing wording. ## Step 2: ask every engine, in a clean session Run each question in at least three assistants. Use a fresh chat or a private window so your history does not bias the answer. For each answer, note:
- Is your brand mentioned? Yes or no.- In which position: first name, second, buried at the end?- Which competitors are mentioned instead?- Which sources are cited, when the engine shows them?- Is what the engine says about you actually correct?## Step 3: build the table One row per question, one column per engine. Mark each cell with the brands named. After twenty questions, patterns appear fast:
- Some competitors show up everywhere. Those are your real competitors in AI search, and they are not always the ones you watch on Google.- Some questions never mention you, even though you clearly answer them. Those are content gaps.- Some engines describe you with outdated information. That usually means an old page, a review site or a directory says something your website no longer says.## Step 4: look at the sources When an engine cites its sources, open them. You will often find the same small set of pages behind many answers: a comparison article, a Reddit thread, a review site, a well structured guide. Those pages are what the model is echoing. Two practical moves come out of this:
- If a cited page is yours, keep it accurate and keep it alive. It is doing more work than your homepage.- If a cited page is not yours, ask yourself why it explains your category better than you do, and whether you should be mentioned on it.## Step 5: repeat it, because answers move AI answers are not stable. The same question can return different brands a week later, after a model update, a new article or a change in how the engine retrieves sources. A one-off audit is a snapshot, not a ranking. That is the part that gets tedious by hand: the same twenty questions, across several engines, every week, with the history kept somewhere. It is the reason we built CiteMe, which runs those prompts on a schedule and shows who gets cited instead of you. But start manually. Thirty minutes of asking the right questions will tell you more about your AI visibility than any dashboard you have never opened. ## A quick checklist
- 20 real customer questions, in their words- 3 or more AI engines, clean sessions- One table: brands named per question and engine- The cited sources opened and read- Errors about your brand listed and fixed at the source- A reminder to run it again next month
Top comments (1)
the clean sessions line does more work than it looks. run this logged in with memory on and you are mostly measuring what chatgpt already knows about you.