How to Check If Your Website Shows Up in ChatGPT, Gemini & Perplexity

Short answer: there is no single dashboard that shows AI visibility across every engine. You check it with a 20-minute combination of two things — (1) a free audit of the on-site signals AI engines use to decide who to cite, and (2) a structured prompt test inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews using the same questions every month. This guide walks through both, gives you a copy-paste prompt set, and shows you what to do with the results.

Why You Cannot Just "Check Google Rankings" Anymore

In 2026, search behaviour is split across at least four surfaces — Google's classic SERP, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — and a single brand can rank #1 on Google while being completely invisible inside ChatGPT. The signals are different and the answers are different. If your visibility tracking still stops at Google rank reports, you are watching one channel out of four.

The good news: AI visibility is testable today, with free tools and prompts you already have access to. You just need a repeatable process.

Step 1 — Run the Free AI Visibility Audit (2 minutes)

Start with the underlying signals. AI engines decide who to cite based on a short list of on-site factors: whether their crawler can reach your site, whether your entity is unambiguous, whether your content is structured, and whether you have a curated llms.txt. Our free audit tool checks all of them in one pass.

Drop your domain in below and the audit runs end-to-end — bot access, structured data, llms.txt, entity signals, content readability. No signup.

Save the results — you will use them in Step 6 to explain why your prompt scores look the way they do.

Step 2 — Brand Prompt Test in ChatGPT, Gemini & Perplexity

Now go to each engine and ask the two prompts that test whether AI even knows you exist. Use exactly these:

1. "What is [Your Business Name]?"
2. "Tell me about [Your Business Name] in [Your City]."

For each engine, record three things in a simple table:

• Mentioned? Did the engine name your business at all?
• Accurate? Are the basic facts (year founded, location, services) correct?
• Cited with a link? Is there a clickable source pointing at your domain?

A "no" on the first question is an entity problem — AI engines do not have a clear concept of who you are. That is what Generative Engine Optimization work fixes. A "no" on citation when the engine does know you means it is using third-party sources (directories, review sites, news) instead of your own pages — an Answer Engine Optimization and content-structuring problem.

Step 3 — Category Prompt Test (No Brand Mentioned)

This is the test that actually matters commercially. A real prospect does not type your business name — they describe a problem. Build a list of 5–10 prompts a customer would naturally ask, with no brand mention. Examples:

• "Best digital marketing agency in Vancouver"
• "Who can help my law firm rank on Google in Toronto?"
• "Compare SEO agencies in [your city]"
• "What does an AEO agency actually do?"

Run each prompt in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. For each result, record:

• Which businesses are named.
• Which URLs are cited (Perplexity makes this explicit; ChatGPT shows it in web-search mode; Gemini shows source chips).
• Whether you appear at all.

The cited URLs are your real competition in AI search. Open them — those are the pages you need to out-structure, out-cite and out-clarify on your own site.

Step 4 — Check Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews appear inline on the Google SERP for an increasing share of commercial queries. They are not part of Gemini's chat surface and they have to be tested separately.

Take your 5–10 category prompts from Step 3 (phrased as Google searches, not chat questions) and run them in a clean browser session. For each search:

• Does an AI Overview appear?
• Which domains are cited as sources?
• Is your domain in the citation list?

AI Overviews lean heavily on schema, freshness and entity strength. If you are not appearing here, double-check Organization, FAQPage and Article schema across your priority pages — the full set is covered in the 9-signal citation checklist.

Step 5 — Verify AI Bots Can Actually Reach Your Site

None of the above matters if AI crawlers are blocked. Check three places:

1. robots.txt: visit https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt and confirm GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and OAI-SearchBot are not disallowed.
2. CDN / WAF rules: Cloudflare, Fastly and AWS WAF often block "AI scrapers" by default. Check the bot-management settings in your CDN dashboard.
3. Server logs: grep your access logs for those user agents over the last 30 days. Zero hits from a given bot usually means it cannot get in.

A blocked bot is the most common reason a perfectly-optimised site never appears in a given engine. Fix this first — every other signal is downstream.

Step 6 — Build a Scorecard and Re-Test Monthly

Drop the results from Steps 2–4 into a simple table. One row per prompt, four columns for the four engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews). Score each cell 0–2:

• 0 — not mentioned and not cited.
• 1 — mentioned but not cited (or cited via a third party).
• 2 — mentioned and cited with a link to your domain.

Track three derived metrics over time: citation rate (% of prompts where you score 2), brand-mention rate (% where you score 1 or 2), and competitor share (which 3 competitors appear most often). Re-run the same prompt set on the same day each month. Real movement only shows up across months, not days.

Free Tools vs Paid AI Visibility Trackers

You can do everything above for free. If you want to automate prompt testing across hundreds of queries and dozens of engines, paid platforms like Profound, AthenaHQ, BrandRank.AI, Otterly and Peec.ai exist and are useful at scale. For most small and mid-sized businesses, the manual scorecard plus our free SEO audit tool covers 80% of the value at zero cost.

What to Do If You Are Invisible

If your scorecard comes back mostly zeros, work through the fixes in this order — they are arranged from highest leverage to lowest:

1. Unblock GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended in robots.txt and your CDN. (Step 5.)
2. Publish an llms.txt file. ~30 minutes; high upside for Anthropic and Perplexity citations.
3. Add Organization, FAQPage and Article schema to priority pages.
4. Restructure your top commercial pages into answer-first form (TL;DR, comparison tables, definition tables) — the core of an AEO program.
5. Build entity strength: Wikidata entry, consistent NAP, branded mentions on authoritative third-party sites — the core of GEO services.

Each of these is covered in detail in the 9-signal citation checklist.

What to Read Next

• The 9-Signal AI Citation Checklist → The full list of signals AI engines weigh when deciding who to cite.
• The Complete llms.txt Guide → The 30-minute file that improves Anthropic and Perplexity citations the most.
• AEO vs GEO: What's the Difference? → The two disciplines that turn AI visibility from accident to system.

Ready to see where you stand right now? Run the free SEO audit, then book a free consultation to walk through the results.