How to Measure Your AI Search Visibility in 30 Minutes a Month

Nobody publishes a leaderboard for AI assistants. There is no rank 3 to track. If you want to know whether your business is being mentioned, you have to ask, and keep asking the same way so you can see change over time. This is a routine that takes about half an hour a month.

Step 1: Fix a list of prompts

Write down 15 to 20 questions your customers might ask an assistant, and keep the list the same each month so results are comparable. Add new questions rather than editing old ones. Cover four groups:

• Category and place: "Who provides managed IT support for small businesses in Brisbane?"
• Your industry: "What should a law firm look for in an IT provider?"
• Decision and cost: "How much does managed IT support cost in Australia?"
• Your brand: "What is [your business name]?" and "Who owns [your business name]?"

The brand questions are the ones that check whether basic facts, such as your location, services and who runs the business, are being reported correctly.

Step 2: Ask in several assistants

Run each prompt in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot, using a fresh chat each time. Turn on web search where it is optional, as that is how most customers will meet it. Do not log in with a profile full of personal history if you can avoid it, as it can colour the answers.

Step 3: Record four things

For each prompt and assistant, note:

1. Mentioned? Was your business named at all?

2. Cited? Was a page on your site linked, and which one?

3. Accurate? Was what it said correct? Log every wrong claim.

4. Who else appeared? Note the competitors and directories it chose instead.

A simple spreadsheet with one row per prompt and a column per assistant is enough.

Step 4: Fix wrong claims at the source

Wrong claims matter more than missing ones. When an assistant gets something wrong, find where it probably learned it: an old directory listing, an out-of-date page, a mismatch between your site and your Google Business Profile. Correct that source. Arguing with the assistant does not fix it. Make your own pages say the right thing plainly, as we describe in how to write FAQs AI assistants can quote.

Step 5: Track AI referral traffic

Some assistants send visitors to your site with a referrer that analytics can recognise. In Google Analytics 4 you can set up an event or a channel group that flags visits from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude, based on the referrer or a utm_source value. We do this on our own site.

Two cautions. First, the numbers will be small for most local businesses, so look for direction, not precision. Second, some visits arrive with no referrer at all and will be counted as direct, so you will under-count.

What good looks like

• Over a few months, you are named in more answers to your category and place questions.
• The pages cited are the ones you want people to land on.
• The brand questions return correct facts.
• AI referral visits are trending up, even if from a low base.

If nothing moves, go back to the basics: can crawlers read your site (see Is your website readable by AI crawlers?), are your business details consistent everywhere, and do your pages answer real questions?

Take care with the prompts you test. Do not paste client details into assistants as part of this exercise, and follow the guidance in our AI security article. The overall approach is covered in AI search for small business. If you want help setting up the tracking or checking your site, contact us, and see how this fits with the Essential Eight.