How to check your AI visibility

What an AI Visibility Checker Actually Measures

An AI visibility checker asks AI assistants the kind of buying question a real customer would ask, then records whether your brand shows up in the answer. That is different from a search engine ranking. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok do not return a list of ten blue links; they write one answer, and either your brand is in it or it is not.

A useful check tracks three things: whether you are mentioned at all (mention rate), where you land in the list when you are mentioned (position), and who gets named alongside or instead of you (competitors). Traditional SEO tools do not measure any of this, because they track search rankings, not generated answers. See what AI visibility is for the full definition.

How to Check Your AI Visibility in 60 Seconds

The fastest way to get a real answer is the free scan on the AI Visibility Snapshot homepage. Enter your brand and category, and it runs one buyer-intent prompt across two AI engines live, no signup, no email, and shows you whether your brand was mentioned and how. You can run it up to three times a day.

It takes about as long as a page reload. You will see whether your brand appeared, roughly where it landed in the answer, and which competitor names showed up next to it. That is enough to tell you if you have a visibility problem worth investigating further.

What a Free Check Can and Cannot Tell You

Be honest with yourself about what one prompt on two engines proves. It can tell you that your brand is or is not mentioned right now, on this specific question, on these two engines. That is a real data point and worth having.

It cannot tell you your actual mention rate, because AI answers are not deterministic: ask the same engine the same question twice and you can get two different answers. It also cannot tell you how you do on the other three engines, whether competitors are consistently beating you, or which web pages the engines are actually citing when they answer. Two engines and one run is a spot check, not a measurement.

What the Full $19 Report Adds

The full AI Visibility Snapshot report runs 10 buyer-intent prompts across all five engines, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, which is 50 live answers instead of one. From those answers it computes your mention rate, average position, share of voice, and sentiment, both overall and broken down per engine.

It also builds a leaderboard of every competitor the engines named, so you can see exactly who is winning the mentions you are not getting, and a where AI looks section listing the domains ChatGPT actually cited when answering buyer questions in your category. On top of that you get 5 to 8 specific recommendations, a white-label "Prepared for" header you can put your own name on, a permanent shareable link, and a print-to-PDF option. There is no subscription, a 14-day money-back guarantee, and the report is ready in about two minutes. You can see exactly what one looks like on the sample report.

How to Check Manually for Free: Copy-Paste Prompts

If you would rather do it by hand, here are the prompt patterns to paste into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok yourself. Run each one in a new, empty chat on every engine, since chat history and memory can bias the answer toward brands you have discussed before. For each answer, note whether your brand appears, its position in the list, and which competitors are named.

• Category best-of: What are the best [category] tools in 2026?
• Use-case: I need software to [specific job to be done]. What do you recommend?
• Comparison: Compare [your brand] vs [competitor] for [use case].
• Alternatives to a competitor: What are good alternatives to [competitor]?
• Price or free tier: What's a good free or cheap [category] tool?

Run each prompt at least twice per engine before you draw any conclusion, since a single run can miss a mention that would show up on the next try. On Perplexity, also check the source links under the answer; that is the closest any of these engines gets to showing its work. For the full repeatable version of this process, see the AI visibility audit guide.

How to Read Your Results

Mention rate is the share of prompts and engines where your brand showed up at all. Position matters just as much: being named eighth in a list of ten barely helps, because most people only read the first few names an engine gives them. Sentiment is whether the mention was neutral, favorable, or backhanded.

Expect a spread between engines. In one measured case, a single brand's mention rate across the same seven category prompts was 43% on Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, 57% on ChatGPT, and 86% on Claude, all on the same day. That spread is normal, not a bug, and it is exactly why checking one engine and calling it done gives you a misleading picture. See the full metric definitions in the methodology.