Your brand has a second reputation you probably aren't managing. While you track Google rankings and review scores, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are answering questions about your product to millions of people every day. What they say might be wrong. You won't know until you check.
AI search visibility is whether your brand gets cited, mentioned, or recommended when someone asks an AI tool a question your company should own. It's not a ranking. There's no position 1. And measuring it requires throwing out most of what you know about tracking search performance.
Why Traditional Rank Tracking Breaks Here
SparkToro's research, highlighted by Semrush, found something that should make every SEO pause: asking an AI the same question 100 times produces nearly 100 unique brand lists, each in a different order. That's not a noisy ranking signal. That's no ranking at all.
Spot-checking tells you almost nothing. That one-off "let me ask ChatGPT about our product" test? Statistically meaningless. You need systematic testing across platforms, and you need to accept that the output is probabilistic, not deterministic. You're measuring a frequency distribution, not a leaderboard position.
Scale still matters: Google processes 417 billion searches monthly while ChatGPT handles 72 billion messages, per Search Engine Land. But here's the trajectory that should hold your attention: users under 44 now average five different search platforms. Search is fragmenting, and AI platforms are absorbing a growing share of discovery queries.
The Manual Audit: Where Everyone Should Start
You don't need a tool subscription to get your first useful data. Semrush recommends running 20–30 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, which takes roughly 6–8 hours for an initial audit. The prompts should cover five categories:
- Identity: "What is [brand]?" and "What does [brand] offer?"
- Pricing: "How much does [brand product] cost?"
- Comparison: "[Brand] vs [competitor]"
- Category: "Best tools for [your category]"
- Reputation: "[Brand] reviews" or "Is [brand] good for [use case]?"
What you're looking for isn't just whether you appear. You're checking what the AI says about you.
One SaaS company saw demo-to-close rates drop 23% because ChatGPT kept citing their 2022 pricing as current. Outdated pricing, deprecated features, misaligned positioning, hallucinated claims — all of this shows up in these audits.
The distinction between citations and mentions matters here. A citation means your website is linked as a source. A mention means the AI names your brand without linking back. Both are valuable; citations are significantly more so.
Platform Divergence Is the Hard Part
Testing only ChatGPT gives you a partial, potentially misleading picture. The Digital Bloom's 2025 AI Visibility Report found only 11% domain overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity citations. The platforms pull from fundamentally different source pools.
The preferences are stark. ChatGPT cites Wikipedia in 47.9% of responses. Perplexity leans heavily on Reddit at 46.7%. Google's AI Overviews draw from a more diversified set. A brand that dominates one platform can be invisible in another.
Brand search volume correlates with AI citations more strongly than backlinks do (0.334 correlation). People searching for your brand by name is a signal these models can actually read. Link authority, the traditional SEO currency, matters less than you'd expect.
What content actually gets cited? Comparative listicles account for 32.5% of all AI citations, making them the highest-performing format per The Digital Bloom. Recency is critical: 65% of citations target content updated within the past year. Only 6% come from content older than six years.
If your cornerstone content hasn't been refreshed recently, it's likely invisible to these models.
Tools That Won't Break Your Budget
For teams ready to move beyond manual audits, several options exist at accessible price points. Semrush's AI Search Visibility Checker is free to start. ZipTie offers free AI visibility checks. Otterly AI and Nightwatch both offer 14-day free trials (Otterly runs $29/month after), giving you enough time to establish whether the data justifies ongoing monitoring.
None of these tools solve the fundamental variability problem. What they do is aggregate enough prompts to surface trends you'd miss manually. Our AI visibility tracking guide covers the measurement framework in depth for teams ready to build a sustained monitoring practice.
The real question these tools help you answer isn't "where do I rank?" but "how often does my brand appear, and is the information accurate?"
Entity Authority Over Link Authority
Search Engine Land's recommended 2026 budget framework: 40% core SEO, 25% digital PR and E-E-A-T, 20% data and reporting, 10% training, 5% innovation. That 25% digital PR allocation reflects a genuine shift in what drives visibility. As they put it: "Large language models don't see your brand the way a search engine does." Entity authority now outweighs link authority for AI surfaces.
Our read: auditing your AI visibility isn't a nice-to-have anymore. The brands that know what AI platforms say about them can fix errors, update stale information, and optimize for the content formats these models prefer. The brands that don't are letting a growing discovery channel run on autopilot — potentially with wrong pricing, hallucinated features, or competitor-favorable framing they've never seen.
Start with the manual audit. Twenty prompts, three platforms, one afternoon.
What you find will probably surprise you.