Check your AI visibility
How to check whether AI search is mentioning your business
A practical routine for checking whether AI Overviews, AI Mode and assistants like ChatGPT surface your business, and reading each signal honestly.
The short answer
You can't see every time an AI assistant names your business, but you can build a useful picture. This is a simple, repeatable routine using Google's free AI impressions report, a fixed set of customer questions put to the assistants, and your own referral traffic, with an honest read of what each signal does and doesn't prove.
- There's no single dashboard that tells you when AI answers name your business. You build a picture from a few checks, each answering a narrow question.
- Google's free Generative AI performance report in Search Console shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, but only as impressions: no clicks, position, click-through rate or the questions people asked.
- Being shown or cited isn't the same as being chosen or endorsed, and no work guarantees inclusion. Treat every check as a directional signal and keep investing in clear, discoverable content.
Decide what you're really checking
Business owners increasingly ask a fair question: when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, does my business come up? It's worth checking, but it helps to be realistic first. There's no single dashboard that records every time an AI answer names your business, the way you might check a bank balance. AI answers are generated fresh, and they can differ from one person, device or moment to the next, so any check gives you a sample and a direction rather than a complete count.
So instead of hunting for one number, you build a picture from a few narrow checks: what Google now reports about your visibility in its AI features, what you see when you ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask, and whether any of those answers actually send someone to your site. Each check answers a different question, and keeping them separate is what stops you reading too much into any one of them.
Start with the free data Google gives you
The most reliable place to start is Google Search Console, which is free and tied to your own website. If you haven't verified your site there yet, that's the first step, and it's the same tool used for ordinary search performance. In its Generative AI performance report, Search Console shows how often links to your site appeared inside Google's AI features, specifically AI Overviews (the AI summary at the top of some results) and AI Mode. It breaks this down by page, country, device and date, so you can see which of your pages are being surfaced and roughly when.
Read it for what it is. The report counts impressions only: it doesn't show clicks, click-through rate, average position, or the questions people typed, and it leaves out experiments still running in Search Labs. If two of your pages appear in the same AI answer, that counts as one impression for the property. In other words, it tells you whether Google's AI is showing your content, not whether anyone clicked or what it earned. That's genuinely useful as a visibility signal, as long as you don't mistake an impression for a customer.
Keep readingMeasure the enquiries, not just the impressions
Ask the assistants what your customers would ask
Numbers aside, it's worth seeing the answers yourself. Write down five to ten questions a real customer might ask an assistant on the way to hiring you, phrased the way they'd say them: 'who does emergency electrical work in Newcastle', 'best conveyancer near me for a first home', and so on. Then put those same questions to the AI tools your customers actually use, which today generally means Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode and assistants such as ChatGPT, and note whether your business appears, whether it's linked, and which of your pages, if any, it points to.
Treat this as a spot check, not a scoreboard. Google itself notes that AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the responses and links they show will vary, and answers can also change with the person, their location and history, and the day. Ask from a signed-out or fresh session where you can, keep the wording of your questions the same each time so you're comparing like with like, and save the date with a short note of what you saw. A paid monitoring tool can automate some of this by sampling prompts for you, but it still only sees a sample and can't observe every private conversation.
See whether AI answers send anyone your way
Being shown is one thing; being visited is another. In your website analytics, look at where visitors come from and check for referrals from AI assistants, which may appear as sources such as chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, perplexity.ai or Copilot. If you see people arriving from those places and going on to enquire, that's the strongest signal on this list, because it connects an AI answer to a real action on your site.
Keep your expectations calibrated. Not every AI tool passes a referrer, so some of these visits are invisible or lumped in with 'direct' traffic, and for most small businesses the numbers here are small and move around. This is a rough indicator of whether AI discovery is turning into visits, not a precise count. It's also a different question from the Search Console report above: one measures visits that arrived, the other measures the times you were shown.
Read the signals honestly
Put the checks together and be careful about what they prove. An impression means you were shown, not chosen. A citation in an AI answer means the model referenced a page, not that the platform endorses or recommends you. And a quiet month isn't proof you did something wrong: Google says AI Overviews are only shown when its systems judge them to add something over normal results, so for many searches they simply don't appear at all.
It's also worth knowing that no amount of work guarantees you appear. Google is explicit that meeting every best practice doesn't guarantee it will crawl, index or serve a page, and its own guidance says you don't need special AI text files, new markup, content chopped into tiny pieces, or a different writing style to show up in AI search; the same fundamentals as ordinary search apply. What you can control is access: if you want to appear, make sure the assistants are allowed to read your public pages. OpenAI, for example, uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot to surface sites in ChatGPT search, and a site that blocks it won't appear in those answers; blocking a training crawler is a separate choice from blocking search.
Turn it into a short monthly routine
None of this needs to take long. Once a month, spend twenty minutes: open the Generative AI report in Search Console and note the trend and which pages appear; run your fixed list of customer questions through the main assistants and record what you see; and glance at referrals from AI tools in your analytics. Write the results in the same simple table each time so you can compare month to month rather than reacting to a single answer.
A short worked example shows the shape, using a made-up business rather than a real client. Say Harbour Legal, a small conveyancing firm, keeps a sheet with three columns: Search Console AI impressions for the month, a yes or no for each of its five test questions across two assistants, and any enquiries whose source looked like an AI tool. In a given month it might note impressions rising, its firm named in two of five answers, and one enquiry that mentioned finding it through a chatbot. That's enough to see a direction and decide whether to keep improving its service pages, without pretending the picture is complete.
Keep readingMake your business easier for AI to understand
Common questions
Is there a tool that shows every time my business is mentioned in ChatGPT or Google's AI answers?
No single tool sees everything. Google Search Console reports how often your pages appeared in its AI Overviews and AI Mode, as impressions. For assistants like ChatGPT you're mostly limited to asking the questions yourself and watching your referral traffic. Paid monitoring tools sample a set of prompts on a schedule, which is helpful, but they can't observe every private conversation, and answers vary between users and sessions, so treat any of these as a sample rather than a complete count.
Do the AI impressions in Search Console mean people clicked through to my site?
No. The Generative AI performance report counts impressions only, meaning the times links to your site were shown inside AI Overviews or AI Mode. It doesn't include clicks, click-through rate, average position or the questions people asked. To understand whether that visibility leads anywhere, look at visits and enquiries in your own analytics and CRM, and measure the outcome separately from the impression.
If I'm not showing up in AI answers, what should I actually do?
Focus on the fundamentals rather than AI-specific tricks. Google's own guidance says you don't need special AI text files, extra markup, tiny content chunks or a different writing style to appear; the same things that help ordinary search help here. Make sure your public pages clearly explain what you do and who you help, that they can be crawled, and that they answer the real questions customers ask. Also remember there's no guarantee of inclusion, and AI Overviews don't appear for every search.
Should I block AI bots or let them in?
That's a business decision, and it's worth separating two things. Blocking a training crawler stops your content being used to train models. Blocking a search crawler stops you appearing in that tool's answers: OpenAI notes that a site opted out of its OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search results, for instance. If your goal is to be found by potential customers through AI, you generally want the search crawlers allowed to read your public pages while keeping private areas closed.
Sources & further reading
Official references supporting the platform guidance in this article.
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