How to check AI search mentions

Separate the products before you test

Google AI Overviews, Chat GPT, Claude, and Perplexity do not share one index. A page can be named in one and absent from the others on the same afternoon. Google’s measurement lives in Search Console. The others do not. Start the note with four columns, not one score.

For Google, use Search Console. The July 2026 guide says appearances in the generative features are part of Search, and it names a Generative AI performance report for those features. It also says no third-party tool has access to Google’s internal ranking or AI systems. A dashboard that claims otherwise is guessing, or scraping a personal account. Read Google AI Overviews and AI Mode before you treat an overview as a ranking you can buy.

The manual check

1. List five questions a real customer asks. Use their words, including the brand name in only one of the five.
2. Ask each question in a fresh chat, signed out if the product allows it, so yesterday’s conversation is not the context.
3. Record the date, the product, the question, whether your name appeared, whether your URL appeared, and the sentence that was used.
4. If a competitor was named and you were not, copy the sentence they were quoted for. That sentence is the passage you did not write.
5. Repeat the same five questions in a month. A single afternoon is a sample of one.

Ask the question your page claims to answer, not a question you wish you ranked for. If the H1 is “What is llms.txt?”, the test question is that question, not “best GEO agency”. A missing mention on a question you never answered is not a defect in the crawler.

Write down a refusal as a result. A chat that says it cannot browse did not see the web. That does not mean the page is ineligible. OpenAI’s search index is filled by OAI-SearchBot, which is a different path from a chat that declined to look. The tokens are on AI crawlers and robots.txt.

What a mention does and does not mean

A named URL means that product was willing to point at you for that question, on that day, in that session. It does not mean it will do so tomorrow. It does not mean the other products will. It does not mean a customer clicked. Pew’s March 2025 study, linked from GEO statistics, found that a link inside a Google AI summary was clicked on 1% of visits that showed one. Being the link and being the click are different measurements.

A missing mention has the same limits. The page may not have been fetched. The fetch may have been blocked. A clearer page may have answered the question. The model may have answered from memory and named no one. Do not rewrite the site because one chat forgot you. Do rewrite a page whose opening does not answer its own H1. That defect shows up without any tool. The writing standard is How to write a page AI search can cite.

When a monitor is the right tool

The manual note breaks down when you have dozens of questions and you need the answer every morning. That is the job of a prompt monitor. OtterlyAI, Peec AI, and Rankscale sell that job as a monthly subscription. Semrush and Ahrefs sell a smaller version of it beside a large SEO suite. The prices, as printed on their own pages in October 2026, are on Best AI SEO tools.

A monitor reports whether a prompt mentioned you. It does not place the mention, and it does not have Google’s internal systems. Buy it when the number is something you will look at every week. Skip it when you have not yet published a page that answers the question. Watching an empty result is a subscription, not a diagnosis.

When an audit is the right tool

An audit is the other job. It reads the site and lists what to change: pages that never answer, titles that disagree with the H1, URLs nothing links to, a crawler that is blocked, a price in the script that is not on the page. DiscoSEO does that once, for one site, for $99. About half the actions are SEO for Google. About half are GEO, so an answer engine has a passage to quote. It is not a daily watch, and it does not guarantee that the next test will name you.

Run the manual check before you pay anyone. Five questions, four products, one page of notes. If the notes say the page never answers, fix the page. If the notes say the page answers and no product names it, then look at crawling, links, and whether anyone else answered the question more specifically. The order is the point. Measurement without a page is a spreadsheet.