The fastest check requires no tools. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any AI assistant and ask a question your ideal customer would ask about your service area. Examples:
- "What should I look for when hiring a web design agency in [your city]?"
- "How do I improve my local SEO for [your industry]?"
- "What is [your core service] and how does it work?"
Look at the response. Is your business mentioned? Is your website cited as a source? Are your competitors cited while you're not?
Run this test 5–10 times with different but related questions. If your site never appears, that's a baseline: you have zero AI citations for your core topic area.
Step 2: Check indexing — AI can't cite what Google hasn't indexed
Before optimising for AI visibility, confirm your pages are actually indexed. An AI system can only cite content it can reach, and most AI tools rely on web-crawled data similar to Google's.
To check indexing:
- Go to Google Search Console and open the Pages report under Indexing
- Look at the "Not indexed" count — any pages listed under "Crawled — currently not indexed" or "Discovered — currently not indexed" are invisible to both Google and AI tools
- Run a site-colon search in Google:
site:yourdomain.com — the number of results is roughly your indexed page count
If you have key service pages, location pages, or articles that aren't indexed, fixing that is the prerequisite for everything else.
Step 3: Check your content specificity
AI tools cite pages that answer specific questions completely. They don't cite pages that describe your services in general terms.
Compare these two pieces of content:
- Generic (won't get cited): "We offer comprehensive digital marketing services to help your business grow online."
- Specific (gets cited): "Keyword cannibalization happens when two or more pages on your website target the same search term. Google then splits authority between them instead of ranking one page strongly."
Go through your most important pages and ask: does this page answer a specific question that someone might type into an AI search tool? If the answer is no, the page won't be cited regardless of how well it ranks in traditional search.
Step 4: Check your structured data
Structured data (schema markup) gives AI systems explicit signals about what your content is and who produced it. It's the difference between an AI knowing your page discusses "web design services in Newnan, GA" and having to infer it from unstructured text.
To check whether structured data is implemented on your site:
- Open Google's Rich Results Test and enter your URL
- Look for: Organization, LocalBusiness, Article, or Service schema
- If none are present, structured data is missing — this is fixable and has a meaningful impact on both traditional SEO and AI visibility
A well-implemented Organization schema with your name, location, service areas, and social profiles tells AI systems exactly who you are and what you do. Without it, AI has to guess — and often doesn't.
For ongoing monitoring rather than one-off tests, several tools now track AI citations specifically:
- Microsoft Clarity AI Visibility (Beta) — free, tracks citations across Copilot and other Microsoft AI surfaces
- Profound — paid, tracks brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI
- Otterly.ai — paid, tracks share of voice in AI-generated answers
- Semrush AI Toolkit — tracks AI Overview appearances in Google search results
The most accessible starting point is Microsoft Clarity's AI Visibility feature, which requires only a Clarity account (free) and a tracking snippet on your site.
