A manual AI visibility check is a repeatable test: you ask answer engines the questions your buyers ask, record what comes back, and compare the results month to month. It shows whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI name your business, how they describe you and who they name instead. This is the process we use at Question.Marketing, scaled down so one person can run it with a spreadsheet and a few hours.
Why is a manual check worth doing?
Search did not die, but the click did. Google's AI Overviews now appear on roughly half of all queries, and around six in ten searches end without anyone visiting a website. Rankings can hold steady while sessions collapse, so a rank report no longer tells you whether prospects are seeing your name.
And there is no AI ranking position to check. There is being named, or not. A manual check measures exactly that.
What do you need before you start?
A spreadsheet with one row per prompt and one column per engine and run.
Access to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, each in a logged-out or fresh session.
A screenshot tool, because every result needs evidence.
A list of your three to five closest competitors, so you can spot who else appears.
Two to three hours for the first cycle.
Step 1: Which prompts should you test?
Write 10 to 20 prompts the way a buyer types them, not the way your marketing team describes the service. Cover several categories rather than ten variations of one question. Our own tracker uses 22 defined prompts across claim, entity, shortlist, education and clinical categories. Borrow the structure:
Shortlist prompts: "Who are the best [service] providers in [location]?"
Entity prompts: "What is [your business name] and what do they do?"
Education prompts: the questions buyers ask before they know who to hire.
Claim prompts: questions that test a specific claim you make about your business.
Lock the wording once it is written. The same prompts must run every cycle, or you cannot compare one month with the next.
Step 2: How do you keep the sessions clean?
Use a logged-out or fresh session for each engine so your account history does not shape the answer. Open a new conversation for each prompt. Run the check the same way each month, with the same browser setup and, where relevant, the same location. Start with ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI, the priority engines we track for our own business.
Step 3: How many times should you run each prompt?
One run proves nothing. A single check carries a margin of roughly ±9 to 13 points, which is why one screenshot is not evidence. Run each prompt at least three to five times per engine and record every result.
Our formal reporting samples around 1,500 answers per source per cycle across 30 prompts, with Wilson confidence intervals and a published margin of error of roughly ±1 to 2 points. A manual check will not reach that precision. Treat it as a directional read, and say so whenever you share the numbers.
Step 4: What should you record for each answer?
Log the same fields for every run:
Mentioned: is your business named in the answer text?
Cited: is your website, or another page about you, listed as a source?
Description: how does the engine describe you? Copy the wording exactly.
Position: are you named first, or further down a list?
Who else appears: which competitors, directories or publications are named instead of you?
Screenshot every result. If you cannot show it, you are describing visibility, not measuring it.
Step 5: How do you turn the log into numbers?
Keep the scoring to three figures:
- 1.
Prompts won: the number of prompts where you were named in the answer.
- 2.
Share of voice: how often you were named, out of all the runs you logged.
- 3.
Cited as the source: how often your own pages were listed as a source.
Record each figure with the period it covers and the margin of error. A baseline without those is not a baseline.
Step 6: How often should you repeat it?
Monthly, at the same point each month, with the same prompts. Your first cycle is your baseline and every later cycle is compared against it. Our own tracker runs monthly, and its baseline cycle ran on 7 September 2026. Only change the prompt set when you have a clear reason, and note the change in the log so the comparison stays honest.
What else catches people out?
Check the technical gate first. Roughly 22% of web traffic sits behind Cloudflare, and content behind a WAF default-block is invisible to AI engines however well it is structured. That is the first yes/no check on any audit.
Read the descriptions as closely as the mentions. Contradictions across your site, directories and regulators are the most common reason a model stays vague about a provider.
Do not judge it on referral traffic. AI referrals are still around 1% of total web traffic, growing roughly a point a month. Being named inside the answer is the goal, not a traffic spike.
Add an attribution question to your enquiry form. A "How did you hear about us?" field that lists individual AI engines is what connects visibility to enquiries.
Why do my results change every time?
That is expected, and it is the reason for repeated runs and for reporting a range rather than a single answer.
What if I never appear for shortlist prompts?
Note which competitors, directories and publications are named instead. Brand mentions across the web carry more weight than backlinks: Ahrefs found a 0.664 correlation for branded mentions against 0.218 for backlinks across 75,000 brands. The third parties being named show you where corroboration is missing.
What if local prompts return almost nothing?
That is common. SOCi's 2026 study of more than 350,000 locations found 1.2% recommended by ChatGPT, against 35.9% appearing in Google's 3-pack.
So, does your name come up?
Write 10 to 20 buyer prompts, run each several times in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI using fresh sessions, and log whether you were mentioned, cited, how you were described and who else appeared. Score it as prompts won, share of voice and cited as the source, then repeat monthly. A manual check shows you where you stand. If it shows you are absent, the next job is changing the content and structure that earn a citation. For proof that it can move, see our 11-week Stitch AI case study.
Would you rather we ran it for you? Our AI visibility audit at Question.Marketing benchmarks you against two competitors across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Originally published on Question.Marketing: How to run a manual AI visibility check for your business. Written by Simon Young, founder of Question.Marketing. Connect on LinkedIn, follow on Bluesky, or listen to the Will AI Recommend You? podcast.