How do I check if my website is visible in AI search results?
A practical way to check whether your website shows up in AI search: manual tests, free data you already own, and the tools worth adding when you need proof.
You can check whether your website is visible in AI search in about ten minutes, and you should do it before spending anything. The catch is that a quick check only tells you what one answer looked like at one moment. To know whether your site is genuinely visible, you need three layers: a manual look, the data you already collect, and eventually a tracker that repeats the test for you.
Step 1: do a manual check, but know its limits
Pick five questions a customer would ask where your site should be an answer. Not "your brand name", but real buying and research questions. Ask each in ChatGPT, Google (look for an AI Overview or switch to AI Mode), Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Note three things for each: whether your brand is named, whether your site is cited as a source, and which competitors appear.
Do it in a logged-out or fresh session, because personalization changes results. Then do it again tomorrow. You will probably see differences. That variance is the point: AI answers are not a stable ranking, so a single screenshot proves very little. Treat the manual check as a way to form hypotheses, not as measurement.
Step 2: use the data you already own
Three sources are free and often ignored.
Search Console. Google has said that appearances in its AI features are counted in the overall Web search figures of the Performance report rather than shown as a separate AI filter, so treat it as a signal that pages are getting impressions and clicks for the questions you care about, and check the current documentation for any change. Look at queries phrased as full questions.
Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing data matters because Copilot draws on the Bing index. If your pages are missing or poorly indexed there, you have an early explanation.
Your analytics and server logs. Check referral traffic for sessions arriving from AI assistants, and check your logs or CDN data for AI crawlers. The user agents to look for include GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User and Google-Agent. If the bots never request a page, the page cannot be cited.
Step 3: run the free checks
Promptwatch publishes several free tools. The AI Visibility Report is a no-login scan that gives you a first read of how a brand appears. The Agentic Readiness Check looks at whether a site is ready for AI agents. The GEO Inspector Chrome extension shows ChatGPT query fan-outs and which sources were fetched versus cited, and it runs locally. There are also llms.txt and robots.txt generators and a directory of 440+ AI crawlers.
Step 4: decide whether you need a tracker
If you only care about a handful of queries, steps 1 to 3 may be enough. A tracker earns its cost when you need a repeatable baseline, want to compare against competitors, or need to know why a page is or is not cited. Here is how the main options compare, using each vendor's page as recorded in our catalog on 24 October 2026, except Promptwatch, which follows its plan matrix.
| Tool | Entry price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | Free Explore (10 prompts, ChatGPT only); paid from $95/mo | Daily monitoring across models, citation analytics, crawler logs from Professional, visitor analytics |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Custom Prompts free on paid Ahrefs plans; AI Visibility Index from $199/mo | Prompt tracking plus a pre-collected prompt index |
| HubSpot AEO | $50/mo ($45 yearly) | ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini with citation analysis |
| AthenaHQ | From $295/mo | GEO score and an Action Center |
| Scrunch AI | From $250/mo | Four LLMs on Core, site audits |
| Profound | Enterprise custom | Up to nine engines, marketing agents |
| Otterly.AI | Lite tier, lowest price here | Four base engines, 15 prompts on Lite |
Why Promptwatch is the one to try first
Visibility has two parts: what the answer says, and why. Most trackers cover the first. Promptwatch covers both. Monitors run daily per model, country and language and report Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Sentiment and Position in Answer. Citation analytics shows which of your pages are cited, and Agent Analytics shows IP-verified AI crawler logs and a citation rate per page, so a page that is crawled but never cited looks different from one that is never crawled. Search Insights overlays Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster data, including Microsoft Copilot traffic, on AI crawls and citations, so the free data from step 2 sits next to the tracker data. Visitor analytics shows AI-referred traffic and conversions.
That mix is the reason we put it ahead of the monitors in the table. Ahrefs Brand Radar and HubSpot AEO suit teams already inside those suites. AthenaHQ and Scrunch AI are strong dedicated options, though the catalog notes neither publishes an AI crawler-log product. Profound is sold as enterprise marketing agents more than as a tracker. Otterly.AI is the fastest way to see a first dashboard, and it is monitoring only.
A simple routine
- Week one: run the manual check, free tools and Search Console review. Write down what you found.
- Week two: pick 30 to 50 prompts and start a tracker. Do not change pages yet.
- Weeks three and four: compare citations against competitors, fix crawler access issues first, then content gaps.
- Monthly: compare periods and review which pages gained or lost citations.
What visibility checks cannot tell you
No check proves you will be recommended, and a single appearance is not a result. What you are building is a baseline you can compare against after each change, which is what makes the work measurable.