Visibility Brief

How to check if ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews cite your site

Buyers can ask ChatGPT or Google "what's the best tool for X?" and get an answer that names a few companies and links a few sources. This guide shows you how to check, by hand, whether your site is one of them.

You need a browser, a spreadsheet, and the names of two competitors. Ten questions take about an hour.

1. Write the questions your buyers actually ask

Skip your brand name. Asking "what is Acme?" mostly tells you whether the model has heard of you. Asking the shortlist question tells you whether you get recommended.

Write ten questions the way a buyer would type them, for example:

  • "What's the best [category] for [type of company]?"
  • "How do I fix [problem your product solves]?"
  • "[Competitor] alternatives for [use case]"
  • "[Your category] vs [adjacent approach]: which is better for [situation]?"

Good sources for wording: your sales call notes, support tickets, the "People also ask" box in Google, and threads where people in your market ask for recommendations.

Pick two competitors you lose deals to. You'll check whether they show up where you don't.

2. Run each question in ChatGPT Search

  1. Open ChatGPT. Use a temporary chat or a logged-out window, so your own history doesn't shape the answer.
  2. Make sure the answer used search. Answers that searched the web show source links. If you don't see any links, ask again and request sources.
  3. Paste the question exactly as written.
  4. Save the full answer text and every link it cites. Copy them into your sheet, and take a screenshot.
  5. Note the date and time.

3. Run the same question in Google

  1. Search the same question in a private browser window.
  2. Look for an AI Overview at the top of the results. Google doesn't show one for every search. If none appears, write "no AI Overview." Don't count that as a miss.
  3. If one appears, expand it, save the text, and note every linked source.

4. Log it in one sheet

One row per question per engine works well:

Question Engine Date Your site cited? Competitor 1 cited? Competitor 2 cited? Sources cited Notes

Keep one rule: if you couldn't capture the answer, write "not sampled." A guessed row is worse than an empty one.

Run each question once and keep the date. AI answers change, and the same question can get a different answer next week. Your sheet is a dated record, not a permanent rank.

5. Read the pattern

When you're done, look for:

  • Questions where a competitor is cited and you aren't. These are your priority list.
  • Sources that keep coming up. If the answers lean on review sites, directories, or a particular publication, that's where the engines are reading about your category.
  • Your pages that do get cited. Look at what they have in common. Usually it's a direct answer to the question, near the top of the page.

6. Check the basics on your own site

A few technical problems can keep you out of AI answers no matter how good your content is.

robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure you're not blocking either of these:

  • OAI-SearchBot, the crawler OpenAI uses to show sites in ChatGPT search answers
  • Googlebot, the crawler Google uses for Search, including AI Overviews

Blocking GPTBot (OpenAI's training crawler) or Google-Extended is a separate decision about AI training. Read the current crawler documentation from OpenAI and Google before you change anything.

Indexing. To be shown as a source in an AI Overview, Google says a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in regular Search. So make sure your key pages don't have noindex or nosnippet on them by mistake.

Structured data. Paste your key pages into Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator. Look for errors, and for markup that doesn't match what's actually on the page. Google says you don't need any special schema to appear in AI Overviews, so fix what's broken rather than adding markup for its own sake.

Answer shape. For each priority question, find the page that should answer it. Does it answer in the first paragraph, in plain words a model could quote? If the answer is buried under marketing copy, rewrite the opening.

7. Fix in order

Start with the question you most want to win, where a competitor is cited and you aren't:

  1. Remove any crawler block.
  2. Fix indexing problems and broken structured data.
  3. Rewrite one page so it answers that question directly. Give it a clear title, a meta description, and one FAQ entry that matches the question.
  4. Wait a few weeks, then run the same questions again and compare against your dated sheet.

Nobody can promise you a citation. What this method gives you is a record of what the engines said and a short list of things you control.

If you'd rather not do it by hand

The Visibility Brief is this same check, done for you. It covers ten of your buyer questions on ChatGPT Search and Google AI Overviews. You get the answers saved word for word, your two competitors compared, and drafts your developer can paste in. It costs $249 and arrives as a PDF within 3 business days. There's no call. See the Visibility Brief