How to check your brand's visibility in Perplexity, ChatGPT and other AI assistants
By Miles Burke, founder of CitableReport.
Published .
To check your brand's visibility in Perplexity, ChatGPT and other AI assistants, ask each one the questions a new customer would ask, with web search on and signed out, and note three things: whether you are named, whether your site is linked, and whether what it says about you is right.
Then check that each assistant's crawler can reach your site, because the gaps usually line up with the assistants that cannot get in. A first check of five assistants takes about an hour. This guide goes through it assistant by assistant, with a scorecard to download.
Key takeaways
- Ask each assistant three kinds of question as a new customer would: your brand by name, your category, and the problems you solve. Note whether you are named, linked and described correctly.
- Test fairly: ChatGPT's Temporary Chat with search on, private windows elsewhere, from your customers' country, three runs per question.
- Each assistant searches a different index: ChatGPT and Perplexity their own, Gemini and AI Overviews Google's, Copilot Bing's. A gap in one usually points to its crawler or index.
- The sources cited matter more than the answer: they show which sites the assistants trust on your topic.
- Missing from all of them usually means content and third-party presence, not crawlers.
Is a brand visibility check the same as tracking?
No. A check is a snapshot: one careful pass across the assistants to find out where you stand and why. Tracking is the same questions asked every month, so you can see whether things are moving.
Do the check first. It tells you which questions matter and which assistants are the problem, and those become the set you track. Our guide to tracking brand mentions in AI covers the monthly part.
How does each AI assistant find the brands it mentions?
Each assistant searches a different index before it answers, and each index is built by a different crawler. That is why a brand can do well in one assistant and be missing from another.
- ChatGPT searches with its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
- Perplexity searches its own index, built by PerplexityBot, and cites its sources in every answer.
- Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google Search. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, with no extra requirements.
- Microsoft Copilot is, in Microsoft's words, powered by Bing's search index.
- Claude searches the web when it needs to, and Anthropic uses Claude-SearchBot to improve its search results.
How do you set up a fair test?
Make each assistant answer as it would for a stranger, not for you. Assistants remember past chats and adjust to the person asking, and a marketer who has spent months asking about their own brand will see a flattering picture.
- In ChatGPT, use a Temporary Chat, which does not draw on your memories or custom instructions, and turn web search on.
- For the others, use a private browser window and stay signed out where you can.
- Ask from the country your customers are in, since answers about local services change with location.
- Ask each question three times. Answers vary from run to run: SparkToro found the same list of brands almost never came back twice.
Write down the date and the assistant for every answer. The models behind them change without notice, and you will want to know what you were looking at.
Step 1: Ask about your brand by name
Start with the questions where you should appear, because if the facts are wrong here they will be wrong everywhere. Ask "What is [your brand]?", "Is [your brand] any good?", "How much does [your brand] cost?" and "[your brand] or [main competitor]?".
Check each answer against the facts: what you do, where you are, your prices, who runs the business. A wrong price or an old address usually comes from a source the assistant trusts more than your own site, such as a directory or an old article. Note which source it cites, because that is where the fix goes.
Step 2: Ask the questions where you want to be recommended
Category questions are the ones that bring new customers: "What is the best bookkeeping service for a small café?" or "Which plumbers in Geelong do emergency call-outs?". Write five to ten of them in the words your customers use, including the casual ones.
For each answer, note whether you are named, whether you are linked, and which competitors appear instead. This is the part of the check most businesses find uncomfortable. It is also the most useful, because it shows which rivals the assistants consider the obvious answer.
Step 3: Ask the questions your expertise should answer
Problem questions test whether your content is quoted, not just your name: "How do I prepare my books for tax time?" or "Why is my hot water system making a banging noise?". These are the questions your guides, FAQs and help pages are written to answer.
If an assistant quotes a competitor's page for a question you have answered well, compare the two pages. The one that is quoted usually gives the answer in its opening lines and backs it with specific facts. Our guide to doing an AI visibility audit covers what makes a page easy to quote.
Step 4: Read the sources behind each answer
The sources matter more than the answer itself. Perplexity numbers its citations and lists them with the answer, and ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Claude usually show their sources when they have searched.
Make a list of every site that is cited for your category. The same few tend to come up again and again: review sites, directories, industry publications, Reddit threads, a competitor's guide. Those are the sites the assistants trust on your topic, and being present and well described on them is often the quickest way into the answers.
Step 5: Check that each assistant can reach your site
Finally, check access, assistant by assistant. In your robots.txt, look for rules that name OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot or Bingbot. Then check your firewall or CDN, which can turn crawlers away even when robots.txt lets them in.
Two details catch people out:
- Perplexity has a second fetcher, Perplexity-User, which visits pages when someone asks about them. Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt, because a person asked for the page, so a firewall is the only thing that stops it.
- Blocking Google-Extended does not take you out of AI Overviews. For Google Search, Googlebot is the control, and nosnippet and similar tags limit what is shown.
Our guide to finding and fixing AI blockers has the commands and settings for each.
How do you check Perplexity in particular?
Perplexity is the easiest assistant to check, because every answer shows its sources. Ask your questions and open the list of sources for each one. You can see straight away whether your site is among them and which page was used.
If you are named but never cited, Perplexity has probably found you on other sites rather than your own. Check that PerplexityBot is allowed in robots.txt and not blocked by your firewall. Then look at the page that should have been cited: does it answer the question in its first few lines?
How do you compare visibility across several assistants?
Lay the results out as a grid: assistants down the side, question types across the top, and a mark in each cell for named, linked or missing. The pattern tells you more than any one answer.
If you are missing from one assistant only, the cause is usually that assistant's crawler or index. If you are missing from all of them, the crawlers are probably fine, and the problem is the content or your presence on the sites they cite.
For Copilot, Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance report that shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, so you can check your findings against Microsoft's own figures.
What should you do with the results?
Work through them in this order:
- Fix access first. A blocked crawler is the quickest fix and the biggest gain.
- Correct wrong facts at their source. Update the directory listing or ask the publisher to correct the article, and make sure your own site states the facts clearly.
- Get onto the sites that are cited. Reviews, directory listings and mentions in the publications that keep coming up.
- Improve the pages that should be quoted, starting with the questions where a competitor is cited instead of you.
Then turn the questions into a monthly set and track them. If you report the results to a client or a board, our guide to reporting AI visibility sets out what to include.
Is there a template for a brand visibility check?
Yes. Our AI brand visibility scorecard (CSV, opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets) has a row for each assistant and question, with columns for whether you were named, linked and described correctly, and the sources cited.
CitableReport checks the part you control directly: whether each assistant's crawler can reach your site, and whether your pages are easy to quote. The free score shows where you stand in about a minute.
