How to Know If AI Assistants Mention Your Company When Buyers Look for What You Sell
Updated: Oct 22
Every month, the same search queries appear in my website's Google Search Console: "why ai does not show our company"
"how do I know if AI assistants are mentioning my company"
"why does Perplexity never mention my company but always mentions the same three competitors"
I use my own website as a lab for my research on search and AI visibility. I write about this topic, and Google shows my articles to people who search for it. That is how I see what they are looking for.
Notice the words "our company" and "my company". These questions are not written by SEO specialists. They are written by people who are responsible for making the company visible: marketers and owners of B2B businesses. Their question is simple: does ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity mention us when buyers look for what we sell?
If a buyer already knows your company name, AI will usually find you.
The real question is different: when a buyer does not know you yet and asks AI a question, for example "Which companies make corrosion testing equipment?", is your company in the answer?
There is no report that shows this. Nobody can see what other people ask AI in their own chats. But you can check it yourself in about one hour. This article explains how.
Table of Contents
Why AI answers are harder to check than Google rankings
In Google, you can check your position. You type what your buyer would search for, for example "corrosion testing equipment", and see whether your website is on page one.
AI assistants work differently. They do not show a list of websites. They write a new answer every time, and the answer depends on how the question is worded. Two buyers can ask almost the same question and get different company names.
So you cannot see what your buyers see. What you can do is ask the same questions they would ask, and write down the answers.
Step 1. Write down the questions your buyers ask
This is the most important step. The check is only as good as your questions.
Do not ask "What is [your company name]?". That only shows whether AI knows your company exists. It does not show whether AI recommends you to a buyer who is looking for a supplier.
Write 10 to 15 questions in three groups:
Questions about what you sell. For example: "Which companies make corrosion testing equipment for the automotive industry?"
Questions about the problem you solve. For example: "How can an engineering team find the latest version of a drawing?"
Questions that compare suppliers. For example: "What are the alternatives to [your main competitor]?"
Use the words your buyers use, not your internal product names. A good source is your sales team: ask them how first conversations with new clients usually start.
Step 2. Ask the same questions in several AI assistants
Ask every question in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Use exactly the same words each time. Also check Google's own AI answers (AI Overviews or AI Mode) directly in Google search.
Open a new chat for every question, so the assistant does not use what you asked before. If possible, log out or use a private browser window, so your own history does not affect the answer.
AI answers can change slightly each time. If a result surprises you, ask the same question two or three times.
Do it by hand at least once. You will see not only whether your company is mentioned, but also how it is described.
Repeat the check once a month with the same questions. Then you can see whether things improve or get worse.
Step 3. Check how AI assistants mention your company. Look at four things in every answer
1. Is your company mentioned? If not, write down which companies are mentioned instead. These are the competitors AI recommends in your place.
2. Is the description correct? Sometimes AI mentions the company but gets it wrong. For example, it calls a manufacturer a distributor, or a software product an IT service company.
3. Does the answer link to your website? If it does, AI uses your own information. If not, the description comes from other sources, and you do not control them.
4. Does AI use your ideas without your name? This is harder to notice, but worth checking. To do this, ask about your topic, not your company, and look for your own wording or ideas in the answer.
One more simple test: ask directly "What does [your company] do, and who is it for?" If the answer sounds vague or wrong, you see the problem immediately.
What to learn from comparing the answers
Do not look at each answer alone. Compare the assistants.
If all of them describe your company in the same way, AI has a clear picture of you. If one gets it right, another gets it wrong and a third does not mention you at all, the picture is unclear.
You can see what such a comparison looks like in a real case: AI Visibility Audit in Practice. What Five Systems Found on the Same B2B Website →
Do you need a paid tool?
There are paid tools that check AI answers for your brand. They work in a similar way: they ask AI a list of questions automatically and record whether your brand appears.
But a tool is only as good as the questions you give it. If the questions do not match what buyers really ask, the tool measures the wrong thing.
A practical order is:
Start with a manual check, to learn which questions matter.
Use a tool later, when you know your questions and want to check them regularly.
You can also find two useful signals in tools you probably already use. Google Search Console shows how often your pages appear in Google's AI answers. Google Analytics (GA4) shows visitors who came to your website from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other assistants. These tools do not show what AI said about you, but they show whether AI sends people to your website.
What to do if your company is missing
A marketer can run the check in this article alone. Fixing the problem is harder: it usually involves several people, and each of them needs to know what exactly to change.
Your website. Check that it says clearly what you sell, who your buyers are and in which situations they need you. AI cannot recommend a company if it does not understand what the company does. This is marketing work, often together with a developer or an agency, and with management approval, because it changes how the company describes itself.
Other sources. AI looks not only at your website, but also at what others say about you: industry directories, reviews, articles and discussions. If your company is not mentioned anywhere outside your own website, AI has little reason to trust it. This is work for marketing and PR, sometimes also for sales.
Access to your website. Ask your developer to check that the website does not block AI assistants from reading it. Sometimes this happens by accident through technical settings, and then AI simply cannot read your pages.
Where to go from here
A monthly check in several AI assistants is not a perfect system. But it shows how AI sees your company today. And checking once a month is much better than not checking at all.
The check shows you whether there is a problem. Finding out why it happens and what to fix first is a different task.
This is what my free Search & AI Visibility Snapshot is for.
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