How to check whether your business appears in AI answers

1. Start with customers, not your brand name

Choose five questions from genuine sales conversations, support enquiries or the services you provide. Include provider discovery, a comparison question and a specific requirement. Include a city or service area only when location matters to the customer's decision.

Save branded questions separately. ‘What is Example Studio?’ and ‘Which studios help small retailers design packaging?’ test different things. Mixing them into one headline percentage can make discovery look stronger than it is.

2. Label where each answer came from

Decide whether you are checking an app manually or collecting API observations. Record the actual product, visible model or mode, date and market context. If a setting is unavailable, write ‘not shown’ rather than guessing.

Sikwati runs web-search-enabled OpenAI and Gemini API checks. It does not directly measure the consumer ChatGPT or Gemini apps, Google AI Overviews or AI Mode. Keep observations from those surfaces in separate groups; an API answer is not a replica of what every customer sees.

For a manual baseline, use a fresh conversation for each question and note any relevant custom instructions or prior context. This makes your procedure clearer, but does not eliminate variation or make a single answer representative of all users.

3. Save enough evidence to inspect the result

Keep the exact question and the answer with its source links. Record a business mention and a website citation as separate fields. If a similarly named company appears, inspect the context and domain before counting it as yours.

An unrelated answer, a failed request or an answer you did not save is not evidence of absence. Label it incomplete or failed. An explicit ‘not mentioned’ should mean you inspected a usable answer and did not find the business.

• Exact question, intended market and date.
• Provider, surface, model or mode when known.
• Saved answer or permitted screenshot, plus cited URLs.
• Business named: yes, no or unclear.
• Your website linked: yes or no, with the exact URL.
• Other providers named and relevant source pages.
• Failures recorded separately from valid answers.

4. Repeat the same questions before drawing conclusions

Use a consistent review interval that fits your budget and keep the question set stable. If you change a question, mark the start of a new series. Compare each provider separately before looking at a combined summary.

Suppose your business is named in two of five usable answers. That means mention coverage was 2/5 for that selected set at that time. It is not 40% of the market, a universal ranking, or proof that the business was recommended. If only four checks succeeded, disclose that denominator and the missing check.

5. Turn a finding into one useful action

When another business appears, read the cited pages and ask what customer need they address. Compare the clarity and evidence on your own relevant page. Do not copy a competitor's wording or assume one page feature caused its inclusion.

Choose one action: clarify a service, correct outdated information, fix an access issue, or add a genuinely useful explanation. Log the change and compare future observations without promising that mentions will improve.

The free Sikwati readiness checker examines website signals, not live AI mentions. Use it for technical triage. Ongoing AI tracking is a paid feature, and should be evaluated alongside—not confused with—website audits and your own business outcomes.