Checking Your AI Visibility
Ask the big AI assistants the questions your customers ask, and see whether the answers mention you, link to you, or recommend someone else — plus what to do about it.
An AI Visibility check does something you could do by hand, but at scale and on a schedule: it asks the major AI assistants the questions your customers actually ask, reads every answer, and tells you whether you were part of it.
Suppose you run a nonprofit that helps people handle legal problems without a lawyer. Real people ask AI "How do I create a power of attorney for free?" every day. A check asks that exact question on ChatGPT and Claude, then reports: did the answer mention your organization? Did it link to your site? Or did it send people somewhere else?
Running a check
Open AI Visibility in the sidebar and click Run probe. A check takes a few minutes — each question is asked on each AI platform you've configured, and every answer is read and analyzed.
Three things feed a check, all configurable in the project's Settings:
- Your questions — SitePulse writes a starter set for you based on what your site offers (questions a customer would ask without knowing your name — the point is to see if you come up organically). You can edit them, add your own, or remove ones that don't matter.
- AI platforms — which assistants to ask: Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
- A schedule — run checks automatically (for example daily or weekly) so trends build up without you remembering to click.
Reading the results
The one-line verdict
The top of the page states your situation in a sentence, for example:
AI talks about you but never links to you — 2 of 24 answers mentioned your brand, none pointed readers to your site.
That's the headline to act on. Being mentioned means the AI knows you exist. Being linked means the AI actively sends people to you — the stronger signal, and the one that produces visitors.
The four numbers
| Card | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Brand hit-rate | Out of all the answers we collected, how many mentioned your name? |
| URL cited | How many actually linked to your website? |
| Mention position | When you do get mentioned, is it in the opening (where people read) or buried at the end? |
| Share of voice | Compared with the competitors you track, who gets talked about most? |
Every card shows plain counts ("3 of 12 AI answers mentioned you") — with a dozen answers per check, counts are more honest than percentages.
What changed since last time
Below the numbers, the summary card compares this check with the previous one in answers, not abstract points: "2 fewer of 12 answers mention you", which questions you stopped or started appearing in, and — when things dropped — a short recovery plan. Every suggested action is a change you can make on your own site (add a direct answer to a page, publish a missing FAQ), tied to the specific question where you lost ground.
Win rate by question type
Questions get grouped by what the asker wants — recommendations ("best X for Y"), how-to ("how do I…"), comparisons ("X vs Y") — with your win rate for each. This tells you where you're strong. A site that wins every how-to question but loses every recommendation question has a clear next move: publish content that makes the case for choosing you, not just instructions.
Who's winning your questions
For questions where you're absent, the cited sources card names who the AI quoted instead — "Answered by competitor.org, cited 4 times on 3 questions". These are not abstract rivals; they are the exact sites taking the customers who asked your questions.
Why their pages get cited — and what to do
For lost questions, SitePulse fetches the competitor page the AI actually cited, compares it with your closest page, and leads with the conclusion:
Do this: Add a concise opening paragraph that directly answers the question, like the competitor's 19-word opener.
The supporting evidence (how their page is structured differently) sits behind a "Why their page wins" toggle if you want the details — but the Do this line is the part that changes your results.
Your Fixes inbox
Everything actionable also lands in Fixes in the sidebar as a to-do item, phrased as an outcome: "Answer 'best free legal help in Illinois' on your site — AI currently recommends someone else." Accept the ones you'll act on, dismiss the rest. See The Fixes Inbox.
Why results differ between AI platforms
Each assistant reads the web differently and has different habits about naming sources — it's normal to be visible on Perplexity but invisible on Gemini. That's useful information, not noise: it tells you where your effort will pay off first. The per-platform bars on the AI Visibility page show exactly this.
What a good routine looks like
- Run a check (or schedule weekly ones) to get your baseline.
- Read the verdict and the "who's winning your questions" list.
- Work through the Fixes inbox — usually publishing or sharpening a handful of pages.
- Give the AI platforms one to two weeks to notice your changes, then compare checks.
Changes take a week or two to show up
AI assistants answer from the web as they last saw it. After publishing improvements, wait 1–2 weeks before reading the next check as a verdict on your work.
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