Customers increasingly ask AI assistants for recommendations and answers before they search or visit a website. You can’t control what they say, but you can see it, and fix the inputs they rely on.
What you can and can’t measure
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: Google includes their traffic in Search Console’s Performance report (Web search type), without a separate breakdown.
- ChatGPT and other assistants: visits often appear as referral traffic in GA4 (for example from chatgpt.com), but mentions without clicks aren’t reported anywhere.
- Answers vary by wording, location, account and over time. Treat checks as samples, not exact rankings.
A monthly check (45 minutes)
1. Write your question list (once)
15–20 questions real customers ask, in their words, across:
- Category: “best deep cleaning company in Dubai”
- Problem: “AC not cooling in summer what to do”
- Comparison: “Shopify or WooCommerce for UAE store”
- Brand: “[your business name] reviews”, “[your business] prices”
- Arabic versions of the most important ones
2. Run them in the tools your customers use
Google (with AI Overviews or AI Mode), ChatGPT, and any others common in your market. Use the same wording each month, logged out or in a clean session where possible.
3. Record
| Field | Example |
|---|---|
| Named? | Yes / No |
| Linked? | Yes / No, which page |
| Competitors named | Three others |
| Wrong facts | Old phone number, wrong areas served |
| Source cited | Directory, review site, your website |
4. Act on what you find
| Finding | Fix |
|---|---|
| Wrong facts (hours, phone, areas, prices) | Correct them where they come from: your website, Google Business Profile, directories, social profiles |
| Not mentioned for a core question | Make sure a page on your site answers it clearly and specifically. See service pages that rank and convert. |
| Competitors always named | Look at what’s said about them: reviews, press, comparisons. Build genuine mentions (reviews, partnerships, local press). |
| Your site never linked | Check crawler access (for example OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search) and indexing. See GEO and AEO explained. |
Track AI referrals in analytics
In GA4, create an exploration or segment for sessions whose source contains AI tools’ domains (for example chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com). Watch the trend and which pages they land on.
Frequently asked questions
Are there tools that track this automatically?
Some paid tools sample AI answers at scale. For a small business, a monthly manual check of 20 questions gives most of the insight.
Can we ask AI companies to correct wrong information about us?
Some offer feedback options. The more reliable fix is correcting the public sources they draw on.
How long before changes show up?
It depends on how often sources are re-crawled and models updated: from days for search-based answers to much longer for others.
If you’d like a monthly AI visibility check set up, that’s part of our traffic sources service.
Free download · Excel template
AI mentions tracker
A question list template, a monthly log for each AI tool (named, linked, competitors, wrong facts), and an action list for fixes at the source.
Download itNo sign-up. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.
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