If three years ago someone had told you your customer was going to start making buying decisions based on what an artificial intelligence answered them, you would have smiled politely and changed the subject. Not anymore.
Today is Monday, it's nine-thirty in the morning, and while you read this there are potential customers of yours asking ChatGPT about your industry. The important question isn't whether this is happening — it is happening. The important question is whether your company appears in those answers. And here's the uncomfortable part: most companies don't know the answer.
This article is so you can change that. I'm going to show you three concrete methods to find out, today and without paying anything, whether your company appears when someone asks an AI about what you sell. Then I'll tell you the real limit of doing it by hand. And at the end, if you're interested, I'll tell you what we do at Play.Interactive when a client wants to solve this seriously.
Method 1: Ask the AI directly
It's the most obvious one and also the one almost no one does. Open ChatGPT. Or Claude. Or Perplexity. Or Gemini. Ideally all four, in separate tabs.
And ask the exact question your customer would ask. Not the one you would ask — the one someone looking for what you sell, without knowing you exist, would ask. If you have a logistics agency, the question isn't "what's the best logistics agency?". That's generic. The real question, the one a customer would actually ask, is closer to "what company do you recommend for distributing consumer products in Mexico City with 24-hour delivery times?".
Ask it. And carefully observe three things.
First, do you appear? If your company is mentioned in the answer —even as a third option— it's a good sign. The AI knows you, it has you classified, and under certain questions it brings you into the conversation.
Second, in what position? The AI usually ranks. It says "I recommend the first one" or "this is the best option for you". If you appear, but you appear third, you're still at a disadvantage compared to the first. And most people accept the first recommendation without checking the others.
Third, if you don't appear, who does? Those three or five names the AI mentioned are your real competition. Not the one you have in your head, not the one you've assumed for years. The one the AI recognizes as a reference in your industry. That's extremely valuable information on its own.
An important detail: do it in an incognito session or with a new account. ChatGPT, Claude and the others know you. They know who you are, where you work, which companies you mention frequently. If you ask the question from your usual account, the result can be biased in your favor. The honest test is the one someone who knows nothing about you does.
Method 2: Search Google with queries that trigger AI Overviews
This method measures something else: whether Google cites you in its AI-generated answers — AI Overviews, that box that appears above the results.
Not every search triggers an AI Overview. Your first task is to do searches that do trigger one. And luckily, there's a clear pattern: AI Overviews appear more frequently in informational, comparative and "what is / how does it work / how much does it cost" queries.
Some examples of the type of search that triggers AI Overviews for an industry like accounting consulting:
- "how much does an accounting audit cost in Mexico"
- "difference between external and internal audit"
- "what company does accounting for SMBs in Querétaro"
Do five or ten similar searches, related to your industry. Observe how many trigger the top box with the generative response. And then, inside that box, observe whether your company appears cited as a source.
AI Overviews cite sources. Sometimes two. Sometimes five. Sometimes none. If your company appears as one of those cited sources, you're part of the answer. If not, you're part of the landscape below the answer — the one fewer and fewer people check. As with the previous method, do it in an incognito session. Google also knows you, and a personalized result is useless for evaluating your real situation.
Method 3: What your Search Console is already telling you (if you know how to look)
This method is the one most companies miss, because it requires looking at data you already have through different lenses. Your Google Search Console doesn't directly tell you "ChatGPT cited you" or "you appeared in an AI Overview". But it leaves you clues. Three of them.
Clue 1: CTR dropping while position holds. Go into Search Console, filter by the last 12 months, and compare two metrics in parallel: your average position and your CTR. If position is stable or better than last year, but CTR is clearly lower, there's one main explanation — AI Overviews are intercepting users before they reach your link. Your place is still the same. What changed is that there's now an answer above your place.
Clue 2: Increase in impressions without a proportional increase in clicks. If your impressions go up but clicks stay the same or drop, it's another form of the same signal. Google is showing your result more often, but fewer people are reaching your site. The intermediary that kept those clicks has a name.
Clue 3: Referral traffic from AI domains in Google Analytics. This isn't Search Console, but it's connected. If you review your site's traffic sources in recent months, you should start seeing visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar. Not many, yet. But there's already a trickle. If that trickle is zero, it's worth asking why — because almost every minimally positioned site has already started receiving that traffic.
None of the three clues, by itself, is conclusive proof. But the three together draw a fairly clear picture of your situation.
The real problem with doing it by hand
If you got this far, you already have the three methods. And they're real methods. They work. They'll give you an honest snapshot of your situation today. But there's a detail I have to tell you, because it would be dishonest not to.
A snapshot, however good, is a snapshot. What I told you above is enough to answer "do I appear today?". It's not enough to answer "am I improving or getting worse?", or "in which specific queries am I gaining or losing ground?", or "when did my visibility change and why?".
To answer those questions, you would need to:
- Define a list of 30 to 50 representative queries for your industry.
- Ask the questions in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini every week.
- Do the Google searches with AI Overview every week.
- Keep a historical log to compare the evolution.
- Cross all of that with your real Search Console data.
That's four to six hours per week, sustained over time, and a spreadsheet that ages poorly. It's feasible. We did it for months for Play.Interactive clients before deciding that wasn't a way to scale.
What we do at Play.Interactive when a client wants to solve this seriously
We built a tool. It's called AEON42 (aeon42.com). Let me tell you what it does, with technical honesty, without pitch.
AEON42 connects your Google Search Console in read-only mode — without installing anything on your site, without touching your code. It imports 16 months of your history to have context from day one. And from there it does three things the manual method doesn't allow.
It monitors your AI visibility systematically. It tracks whether Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity cite you for queries relevant to your industry, week by week, and shows you the evolution.
It detects nine types of opportunities automatically. Quick wins (queries in position 4–20, one push away from the first page), traffic drops, keyword cannibalization, schema problems, indexation problems. All prioritized by real impact, not alphabetical order.
It tells you what to do, not just what's happening. This is the part that makes the biggest difference. For every detected opportunity, you don't get a chart — you get the concrete action. The specific title tag worth changing. The JSON-LD ready to paste. The next step.
It costs $49 USD per month. For comparison, traditional SEO suites start in similar ranges, but AI visibility is usually charged as a separate module that pushes the total to around $200 monthly. In AEON42 it's included from day one because, in my opinion, it no longer makes sense to think about SEO without thinking about GEO and AEO at the same time.
The trial is 14 days free and without credit card. You connect and see your first reading in under five minutes.
Try AEON42 — 14 days free
Connect your Google Search Console at aeon42.com and see your first reading in under 5 minutes. No credit card. As a launch offer, the first 30 customers who subscribe with code FOUNDING keep a 30% lifetime discount. Spots still available.