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By 1001 SEO Mediaai searchwebsite mentionsai citationsgeo

How can I check if my website is mentioned by AI search engines?

How we check if a website is mentioned by AI search engines: manual tests, analytics, crawler logs and a tracker, and how to read the results.

Almost every new client asks us this in the first meeting, usually after typing their brand into ChatGPT and not liking what came back. A single answer is not data. Here is how we check properly, in the order we do it.

First, separate three things

When a client says "mentioned", we ask which of these they mean.

  • Mentioned: the engine names the brand in its answer.
  • Cited: the engine lists a page from the site as a source.
  • Visited: someone clicked and arrived.

They overlap, but they are not the same. We have seen sites cited often with few visits, and brands named often with no links at all. Treating them as one number hides what to fix.

Step 1: a quick manual pass

Open the main engines and ask what your customers ask. Category questions first ("best [product] for [use case]"), comparison questions second, brand questions last. Write down the engine, the date and the exact wording.

This tells you roughly where you stand. It does not tell you how stable it is. Answers change between runs, between countries and between accounts, so we treat it as a sketch.

Step 2: a prompt panel that runs on a schedule

Next we build a panel of 30 to 50 prompts and run it daily. That turns anecdotes into trends. We run client programs on Promptwatch, which runs prompt panels daily per model, country and language and reports Visibility Score, Share of Voice, Position in Answer and Sentiment. For a quick start with no commitment, it offers a no-login AI Visibility Report and a free Explore plan (10 prompts, ChatGPT only). Essential is $95 a month for 50 prompts and all models.

The GEO Inspector Chrome extension is useful for a single page of a conversation: it shows the fan-outs ChatGPT ran and which sources were fetched versus cited, and it runs locally.

Step 3: look at the citations

Which pages are cited? Promptwatch's citation analytics reports page-level and domain-level citations, with Page Tracker for specific URLs, yours or a competitor's. We look for three patterns:

  • Our page is cited, and that is what we wanted.
  • A competitor's or a third party's page is cited, and ours is not. That is the page to beat.
  • Our brand is named but no page of ours is cited. The engine knows us from somewhere else, and we find where.

Step 4: check that bots can read the site

A page cannot be cited if the crawler cannot fetch it. We read AI crawler logs, which in Promptwatch's Agent Analytics are real-time and IP-verified, so spoofed user agents are filtered out. We look for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the others hitting the pages that matter, and for errors on those pages. Crawler logs begin on the Professional plan ($245 a month). On Essential you will not have them, and you can check your own server or CDN logs instead.

Web analytics can show sessions from AI products, but referrer data is incomplete, so we use it as a floor. Visitor analytics in Promptwatch (a lightweight script, the GTM template or the WordPress plugin) reports AI-referred visits and conversions by engine. We also overlay Search Console and Bing Webmaster data using Search Insights, which shows traditional search traffic next to AI crawls and citations. We tell clients to read the documentation of Google and Bing for what their own consoles report about AI features, because that changes.

How we read the results

  • Not mentioned anywhere: usually a content or authority problem. Start with the pages that should answer the question.
  • Mentioned in some engines only: check the sources each engine uses. Crawler access can differ by bot.
  • Cited but few visits: look at titles and snippets, and at whether the answer satisfies the question without a click.
  • Mentioned wrongly: trace the description to its source and fix that page.

Mistakes to avoid

  • Judging from one query on one day.
  • Counting your own logged-in tests as evidence.
  • Ignoring which country the engine thought you were in.
  • Treating a mention as a sale.

Limits

No method guarantees a mention, and tools do not control the answer. They show how often, where and why, which is enough to decide what to do next.

Where to begin

Write down the ten questions you most want to appear for, run them manually today, and then put them into a tracker for two weeks. The gap between those two views is usually the most useful finding.

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