How do I know if AI search mentions my business?

Test the questions your customers ask

Write ten to twenty realistic questions. Not just your business name, but the way a customer would phrase it: “best family lawyer in Lethbridge for custody”, “who repairs commercial walk-in coolers in Calgary”. Include your service, your area and a detail or two.

Run them in each assistant with web search on, ideally logged out or in a private window. Record whether you’re mentioned, how you’re described, and which sources are cited. Also ask directly: “What do you know about [your business]?” That shows how it understands your entity and whether anything is wrong.

Check your analytics for AI referrals

When someone clicks a cited link, the visit often shows up in Google Analytics 4 as referral traffic from domains like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com or copilot.microsoft.com. Some AI traffic arrives without a referrer, so it lands in “direct” and is invisible.

Create a simple report or segment for those sources and watch the trend. Small numbers are normal for many local businesses right now. What matters is whether they convert.

Google’s own AI features

For Google, Search Console includes AI Overview and AI Mode appearances in its normal Performance data, but at the time of writing doesn’t report them separately. You can watch impressions for question-style queries as a rough signal.

Paid AI visibility tools now exist. They run large batches of prompts and report how often you’re mentioned. They can be useful for bigger brands, but they only sample a slice of possible questions, so treat their scores as directional rather than exact.

I keep a short list of each client’s key customer questions and run them through the main assistants every quarter, saving the answers. Over time that shows whether the business is appearing more often and which sources are being cited.

If an assistant gets something wrong, like old hours or a service they no longer offer, I trace it to the source, usually an outdated listing, and fix it there.