How to track your AI visibility

More of your buyers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews for recommendations instead of scrolling a page of links. If those answers name your competitors and not you, you are losing deals you never see. The first step to fixing that is measuring it. This guide walks through a process you can run by hand today, and how a tool makes it faster.

Shortcut: our free AI Visibility Checker builds a tailored prompt set for your brand and scores you in minutes. No signup.

Step 1: Build your prompt set

Forget keywords for a moment and think in questions. Write down the 10 to 30 questions a real buyer would type into an assistant when they are close to choosing: "what is the best X for a small business", "X alternatives", "is X worth it", "best X for agencies". This prompt set is the backbone of everything that follows, so make it reflect how people actually buy, not how you describe yourself.

Step 2: Run each prompt across the engines

Ask each prompt in the engines your buyers use. For most people that is ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. Ask the question plainly, read the full answer, and note what it says. Do not stop at one engine: coverage varies a lot between them, and you want the full picture.

Step 3: Record the signals that matter

For each prompt and engine, capture four things:

• Mention rate. Did you appear at all? Across your whole prompt set, what percentage mentioned you?
• Citations. Did the answer link to your site as a source, or just name you?
• Share of voice. How often do you appear versus your named competitors?
• Sentiment. When you are mentioned, is it positive, neutral, or a warning?

A simple spreadsheet with prompts down the side and engines across the top is enough to start.

Step 4: Track over time and against competitors

One snapshot tells you where you stand; a trend tells you whether you are winning. AI answers vary run to run, so repeat the same prompt set on a schedule, monthly is plenty for most small brands, and watch the direction. Add two or three competitors to your tracking so you know whether a dip is you slipping or the whole category shifting.

Step 5: Act on the gaps

The point of measuring is to act. For every prompt where you are missing, ask why: is there no content that answers it clearly, is your brand not associated with that topic, or are competitors simply cited more often elsewhere? Then create or improve the content, strengthen your entity, and earn a few more credible mentions. Re-measure next cycle. If you are new to the "why", start with how AI engines choose what to cite.

By hand or with a tool?

Doing this manually is completely valid, and it is the best way to understand what the answers actually look like. But it gets slow: dozens of prompts, across four engines, repeated every month, times several competitors, adds up fast. That is exactly what AI-visibility tools automate. They run your prompt set on a schedule, track mentions, citations, share of voice and sentiment, and chart it over time.

If you want to try one, start with the free options or the cheapest tools that are actually good. For the full picture, see our ranked list of the best AI-visibility tools, or browse everything we track.

Frequently asked questions