Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews the questions your buyers ask, record who they name and which sources they show, and track it over time.
AI search visibility
To find out whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews recommend your business, ask them the questions your buyers ask, write down who they name and which sources they show, and repeat the same questions regularly. One answer on one day tells you little. A fixed set of questions checked over time shows where you are named, where you are missing and what the answers rely on. If you are new to the idea, start with what generative engine optimisation is.
Question bank
Start with 20 to 30 questions in the words your buyers use. Good sources are the queries in your Google Search Console Performance report, notes from sales calls, support tickets and the questions prospects send before they buy.
Cover the kinds of questions that lead to a shortlist:
For your category and audience, such as "best time tracking software for small agencies".
Naming the market leader or a direct competitor.
Between two named products.
Where a product is part of the answer, such as "how do I track billable hours across clients".
Measurement
Assistants answer in different ways. Some answer from what they learned in training; others search the web first and show the pages they used, and many offer both modes. Note which mode you used, because the answers can differ a lot between them.
For every question and assistant, record:
A spreadsheet with one row per question, assistant and date is enough to begin with.
Sources
When an assistant shows sources, they tell you where its answer came from. In many categories those are review sites, directory listings, "best tools" roundups, comparison pages and the product sites themselves. If a roundup that leaves you out keeps appearing, or a review profile shows your old pricing, the answer will tend to repeat it.
This turns a vague goal ("be visible in AI") into specific work: correct a listing, ask a roundup's author to consider your product, or publish the page that is missing from your own site.
Pages and listings
No assistant publishes exactly how it chooses which businesses to name, so treat the steps below as ways to make accurate information easy to find, not as a formula.
Answer the basic questions plainly on your own pages: what the product is, who it is for, what it costs and how it compares. A direct sentence near the top of a page is easier to quote than a slogan.
Use the same name and description for your business on your site, your review profiles and the directories in your category, and keep them current.
If buyers ask for alternatives to a competitor, publish a fair comparison page that explains when your product fits and when it does not.
Check that your robots.txt does not block the crawlers of the assistants you want to be read by. OpenAI documents GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, Anthropic documents ClaudeBot and Perplexity documents PerplexityBot; check each provider's current documentation before you change anything.
Reading the trend
Read the share of questions where you are named as a trend over several weeks. Assistants update their models and their search behaviour, and competitors change their pages too. Measure a fixed question set, note what you changed and when, and look for movement on the questions you worked on.
Doing it with GX360
GX360 keeps a question bank for your category, asks it of the AI assistants your buyers use and records who was named and which sources each answer read. It then turns the gaps into proposed fixes, such as a missing page, an outdated listing or a correction to request, and nothing is published until someone on your team approves it.
The AI visibility tracker shows what it checks, and the plans show which assistants each one covers.