Start With a Baseline AI Visibility Test

The simplest way to check your company’s AI visibility is to test the questions a real customer might ask. Do not begin only with your company name. Branded prompts tell you whether an AI platform understands who you are, while non-branded prompts reveal whether your business appears when someone is still choosing a provider.

Create a list of 15 to 30 searches or prompts covering:

• • Your company name and primary services
  • “Best,” “top,” or “recommended” companies in your city or service area
  • Common questions customers ask about your products or services
  • Comparisons between your service and common alternatives
  • Problem-based questions that describe a customer’s need without naming your service

Run similar prompts through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI search experiences. Record whether your company is mentioned, linked, cited, accurately described, recommended, or completely omitted. Repeating the process over time gives you a basic AI visibility benchmark.

How to Check Your Visibility in ChatGPT

When testing ChatGPT, use questions that naturally require current information and review the sources provided with the answer. ChatGPT Search can display citations and source links, allowing you to identify the websites being referenced in a response.

Look for three types of visibility: your business being directly recommended, your website being cited as a source, or your content being referenced to help explain a topic.

Being cited can be valuable even when your company is not the primary recommendation. It indicates that your website is becoming a source that can help support AI-generated answers.

Technical accessibility also matters. OpenAI states that public websites can appear in ChatGPT Search and recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot to access site content if publishers want their pages eligible to be discovered, summarized and cited. Inclusion or placement, however, is not guaranteed.

How to Check Your Visibility in Gemini

Use the same branded and non-branded testing process with Gemini. Ask about your services, geographic market, industry expertise, customer problems, and topics covered extensively on your website.

Pay attention to whether Gemini mentions your company, links to your site, accurately summarizes your services, or consistently references competitors instead.

Do not evaluate performance from one search. Change the wording and search intent. For example, someone could ask “SEO company in Naperville,” “who can help my company appear in AI search?” or “recommended companies for local SEO and AEO.”

These searches have similar commercial intent, but an AI platform may interpret each one differently. Some Gemini experiences also use Google Search for grounding, reinforcing the connection between strong search visibility and AI discoverability.

Check Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

Google AI visibility should be evaluated alongside traditional organic rankings. Search your highest-value informational, commercial and local queries. When an AI Overview appears, examine which businesses and websites are referenced.

Google states that its generative AI Search features rely on its core Search ranking and quality systems. Google continues to emphasize foundational SEO, crawlable websites, useful content and unique information rather than special AI-only optimization tricks.

Google has also introduced Generative AI performance reporting in Search Console, providing eligible website owners with more direct information about visibility within generative AI Search experiences.

Create an AI Visibility Scorecard

Instead of asking, “Do we rank in AI?” create measurable benchmarks. A monthly scorecard could track brand mentions, website citations, recommendation frequency, accuracy of company information, competitor mentions and AI referral traffic.

Keep your core prompt list relatively consistent. If you test completely different questions every month, it becomes difficult to determine whether visibility is actually improving.

Most importantly, connect AI visibility to business results. Being mentioned by ChatGPT or Gemini sounds impressive, but qualified website visitors, phone calls, contact forms, leads and sales are ultimately what matter.

Improving AEO and GEO Starts With Strong SEO

If your company rarely appears in AI-generated answers, begin with the fundamentals. Make important pages crawlable and indexable, strengthen technical SEO, improve internal linking, clearly define your products and services, and publish original content demonstrating legitimate expertise.

For AEO, provide concise answers to important customer questions and organize pages so answers are easy to identify.

For GEO, strengthen your company’s overall digital footprint with specific facts, first-hand expertise, original examples, useful comparisons, strong entity signals, credible backlinks and consistent third-party references.AI visibility should be treated as an ongoing measurement process rather than a one-time ranking check. Search behavior is expanding, but the objective remains familiar: become one of the most useful, trustworthy and discoverable resources for the questions your potential customers are asking.

Contact Fischer Builds today at 630.338.5596 for more information how your start up can take advantage of SEO services to show up more in AI results.