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Guide

How to check if your business appears in AI search

You can do this yourself right now, for free, in about five minutes. Here's exactly how, plus the one thing a manual check can't tell you.

Published 2026-08-09 · CitationLoop Research

STEP 1

Write down the real questions, in a customer's words

Not "digital marketing services" — the actual sentence someone would say: "who does emergency plumbing near [neighborhood]," "best divorce lawyer in [city] that offers payment plans," "is [your business] open on Sundays." Write 5-10 of these.

STEP 2

Ask each question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot separately

Use each assistant's web-search mode (not a plain chat with search off — some default to search, some don't), and start a fresh conversation each time so earlier context doesn't bias the answer.

STEP 3

Record one of four outcomes per question, per engine

OutcomeWhat it means
CitedYour business is named AND a source/link to your site is shown.
RetrievedYour page was pulled into the assistant's search results, but the answer didn't end up naming or linking you.
MentionedYour business is named, without a direct source link (often from the model's own training knowledge, not a live fetch).
AbsentNot named, not linked, not in the answer at all.

The gap between "retrieved" and "cited" is the most useful thing to watch — it tells you the assistant found your page and still chose not to use it, which usually means a content or trust-signal problem rather than a crawlability one.

STEP 4

Do it again on a different day before drawing conclusions

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the one that matters most. Asking an assistant the identical question twice can produce a different answer both times — these are non-deterministic systems, not a lookup table. A single "yes, I'm mentioned" or "no, I'm not" from one run isn't reliable evidence either way; it's one sample from a distribution.

This is also the core problem with judging your AI visibility off a single screenshot someone sends you, or a one-off check from a tool that only ever runs a prompt once. A sampled rate (mentioned in 6 of 10 tries) is a meaningfully different claim than a single yes/no — and it's the difference between measurement and a guess that happened to be right once.
THE SHORTCUT

Or run it automatically, across dozens of question variations, for free

This is literally what CitationLoop's free audit does — it infers the buyer questions for your category, runs them live across engines, and gives you the cited/retrieved/mentioned breakdown along with why. Same method as above, just at the scale a manual check can't reach in five minutes.

Paste your domain and see exactly how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot currently describe your business — no card required.

Run the free audit
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