Before you invest in any AEO strategy, you need to know where you’re starting. And the fastest, cheapest way to do that requires nothing more than the free versions of three AI platforms and about 20 minutes.
I call this the AI Visibility Check. I run it at the beginning of every AEO audit. Here’s the exact process.
What You’re Checking For
You’re not checking whether AI knows your brand by name — searching ‘what is [your company]’ doesn’t tell you much. What you’re checking is whether you appear in the answers to the questions your ideal customer asks before they know they need you.
That’s the visibility that matters. Can a buyer find you through conversational AI discovery, using the language they naturally use, before they’ve decided on a solution?
Step 1: Build Your Prompt List
Before you open any AI platform, write down five to eight questions your ideal customer would ask in the research phase. Not branded questions. Intent questions.
For a digital marketing agency, these might look like: ‘How do I get my website to appear in AI search results?’ or ‘What is AEO and do I need it?’ or ‘How do I know if my site is optimized for ChatGPT?’ or ‘Who does AEO audits for small businesses?’
For an ecommerce store: ‘What is the best [product category] for [specific use case]?’ or ‘How do I choose between [your products] and [competitor products]?’
Write the questions in plain conversational language. That’s how real users prompt AI systems.
Step 2: Run the Prompts Across Three Platforms
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini in separate browser tabs. Run each prompt on all three platforms. Document the results.
For each response, you’re looking for: Is your brand named or cited? Is your website URL referenced? Is your content paraphrased or quoted? And if you’re not there, who is?
That last question matters as much as the first. Knowing which competitors are getting cited — and in which contexts — tells you exactly what AEO authority they’ve built and where your gaps are most costly.
Step 3: Interpret What You Find
Here’s how to read the results:
- You appear by name with a citation or URL: Strong AEO signal. Your content is being retrieved and your entity is recognized. Focus on expanding coverage to more query types.
- You’re paraphrased without attribution: Your content is being used but you’re not getting credit. This is an entity and schema problem — the AI can’t confidently attribute the content to you.
- You don’t appear but direct competitors do: Retrieval Gap. Your competitors have structured their content for AI extraction and you haven’t. This is fixable.
- Nobody in your category appears: Emerging AEO opportunity. The AI doesn’t have good sources for this query type yet, which means whoever structures content for it first will likely own the citation.
Step 4: Document and Repeat Monthly
The AI Visibility Check is not a one-time exercise. AI training data updates, platform algorithms shift, and citation patterns change. Run this check monthly across the same prompt set and track changes over time.
If you implement AEO changes — adding FAQ schema, updating answer blocks, improving entity consistency — this is how you measure whether those changes are working. Citation growth is your primary AEO KPI.
The tools for tracking AI citations at scale exist and are improving (Peec AI, Profound, and others). But for most small and mid-size businesses, manual spot-checking across three platforms on a monthly cadence is sufficient to see the directional trend.
If you run this check and you don’t appear anywhere, congratulations — you now have the clearest possible picture of your AEO starting point. That’s the diagnosis. The audit is where we figure out exactly why, and what to do about it.