The Manual Method: Checking AI Visibility Yourself

The simplest way to check whether your website appears in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers is to ask them directly. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and type prompts that your ideal buyers would ask when researching products or services in your category.

For example, if you sell project management software, try prompts like: "What are the best project management tools for remote teams?" or "Compare project management software for marketing agencies" or "Which project management platforms integrate with Slack?"

Read the responses carefully. Does your brand appear? Is it mentioned accurately? Is it mentioned early in the response or buried in a list? Is it mentioned at all?

The Problem With Manual Checking

Manual checking has three significant limitations. First, AI responses vary — the same prompt asked twice can produce different results, so a single check gives you a noisy signal. Second, it's slow — thoroughly checking your visibility across 20–50 relevant prompts across multiple AI platforms takes hours. Third, it doesn't give you a benchmark — you can't see how your visibility compares to competitors without also running the same prompts and tracking competitor mentions.

Prompts to Use for Manual Checking

For a manual check, use prompts across four categories: category-level awareness ("what is [category]?"), vendor comparison ("compare [category] tools"), problem-specific ("best [category] software for [specific use case]"), and selection-stage ("[Category] tools with [specific feature]")

Run each prompt in both ChatGPT and Perplexity. Take note of: whether your brand appears, how many times it's mentioned, what's said about it, and which competitors appear alongside you.

Systematizing AI Visibility Measurement with SOV Scanning

For consistent, comparable measurement over time, a manual approach breaks down quickly. Kennext's AI Share of Voice scan automates this process — you describe your business in 1–2 sentences, and Kennext generates 50 custom prompts tailored to your industry and buyer journey, runs them across multiple AI engines, and returns a mention rate with per-platform breakdown and competitor benchmarking.

This gives you a repeatable baseline you can track scan over scan, so you can see whether changes to your content and structured data are actually improving your AI visibility — rather than relying on spot-checks that vary each time.

What to Do If You're Not Appearing

If AI engines aren't citing your brand, the most common causes are: insufficient structured data (missing FAQ schema, Organization schema, Product schema), content that doesn't directly answer buyer questions (too promotional, not enough direct Q&A format), lack of third-party citations from authoritative sources, and absence of a llms.txt file. Start with a free Kennext scan to get an AEO Readiness score — it will identify the specific issues holding your AI visibility back with code fixes for each one.