How do you check whether AI recommends your business?

This is the same work whether you call it GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or “AI SEO.” The labels differ; the goal doesn’t. You want an AI assistant to name your business when someone asks a question you can answer. The audit below takes about 30 minutes, needs no paid tools, and gives you a baseline you can re-run every month.

Why this is worth 30 minutes

ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users in February 2026, according to OpenAI.^[1] Google’s AI summaries are changing click behaviour too. In Pew Research Center’s study of real browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% when none did.^[2] They clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits.^[2]

The implication is direct. A growing share of questions get answered before anyone reaches a website. If your business is not in the answer, the customer may never see your page at all.

Step 1: Write ten questions your customers actually ask

Don’t start with your brand name. Asking “What is [Business]?” only tests whether the AI knows you exist. The value is in questions where the customer doesn’t know you yet. Write ten prompts across these five types, using a local dental clinic as the example:

Use the phrasing a customer would type or say: full sentences, the city, the urgency. That is how people talk to AI assistants, and it is what the assistant tries to match.

Step 2: Run each prompt across four engines

Run every prompt in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Mode. Use a private window or a logged-out session where you can, so your own history doesn’t shape the answer. Run each prompt two or three times. Generated answers vary between runs, and a business that appears once in three tries is in a different position from one that appears every time.

For each run, record one of three outcomes:

• Named and linked. You are in the answer and cited as a source. This is the result you want.
• Named, not linked. The AI knows you, but it is getting its facts about you from someone else’s page.
• Absent. A competitor, a directory or a forum thread filled the slot.

A spreadsheet with prompts as rows and engines as columns is enough. This log is your baseline. Without it, you can’t tell whether anything you change later actually worked.

Step 3: Read the citations, not just the answer

The most useful part of an AI answer is its source list. Perplexity, ChatGPT search and AI Mode show which pages they drew on. Those citations are a map of where the engine looks for trustworthy information in your category.

• Directories and review sites dominate? Your listings there matter as much as your website does.
• A competitor’s service page is cited? Open it and study how it is structured. It is answering the question directly.
• Reddit or local forums appear? Real customer discussion is shaping the answer in your category.
• Your own site is cited for the wrong fact? An old price or outdated hours is an accuracy problem you can fix today.

Step 4: Check that AI crawlers can reach your site

An AI engine can’t cite a page it can’t fetch. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check how it treats these crawlers:

• OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. Changes take about 24 hours to apply.^[3]
• GPTBot. A separate OpenAI crawler for model training. OpenAI treats the two settings independently, so you can block training and still allow search.^[3]
• Googlebot. Google lists allowing crawling “in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure” among the fundamentals for its AI features.^[4]
• Google-Extended. A control token for whether Google may use your content to train Gemini models and to ground answers in Gemini Apps.^[5] It is not the switch for appearing in Google Search.

The CDN point catches many small businesses. Some hosting, CDN and security services offer settings that block AI crawlers at the network level, so robots.txt can say “allow” while the crawler is still turned away. If your site sits behind one, check its bot settings as well.

Step 5: Fix the page, not the prompt

Once you know where you are missing, most fixes happen on your own site. Google is explicit that “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”^[4] The work is SEO fundamentals, done precisely.

Give each question a page that answers it

If “emergency dentist in Tacoma” is a question you want to win, you need a page about emergency dental care, not a line on a services list. AI search matches passages to questions, so a page about one service gives it one clear passage to use. We cover this in depth in why every service needs its own page.

Put the answer in the first paragraph

Kevin Indig’s analysis, reported by Search Engine Land, found 44.2% of ChatGPT citations came from the first 30% of a page.^[6] Open each page with a direct answer: what you do, for whom, where, and how it is priced. Save the story for further down.

Write plainly and cut the sales language

Semrush’s January 2026 study of AI-cited content found clarity and summarization had the strongest positive correlation with citation (+32.8%), while promotional tone correlated negatively (−26.2%).^[7] Those are correlations, not guarantees. They still point one way: facts beat adjectives.

Keep your facts identical everywhere

Your name, phone number, hours, service area and prices should match across your website, Google Business Profile and directories. Google’s guidance for AI features specifically mentions keeping Business Profile information up to date.^[4] When sources disagree, an AI has less reason to state any of them with confidence.

Earn mentions on the sites AI already cites

Step 3 showed you which sources the engines trust in your category. Getting listed, reviewed or mentioned on those sources is slower than editing your own site. It is also the part competitors find hardest to copy.

Re-run the audit every month

AI answers shift as engines update and competitors publish. Re-run the same prompts monthly, in the same engines, and compare against your baseline. Track the share of runs where you are named and linked. One good answer is an anecdote. A rising share across thirty runs is a trend.