AI visibility
How to tell whether AI assistants cite your site
There is no analytics panel for assistant citations. What works is a fixed list of the questions your customers actually ask, run against the assistants they actually use, on a schedule, with who gets named written down each time.
Accept that the measurement is manual
None of the major assistants publish citation attribution. That is inconvenient and it is also the current state, so the choice is between a manual method and no method. The manual one is not difficult — it is just work that has to be done the same way each time to be worth anything.
Build the question list once
Write down the questions a customer would actually ask before choosing a supplier like you. Not keywords: questions, in the words a person would use out loud. Ten to twenty is plenty. Fix the list, because the value comes from asking the same things repeatedly.
Record who gets named, not just whether you do
For each question, note which businesses are named, in what order, and whether a link is given. Your competitors’ presence is the more useful half of the record: it tells you what the model currently treats as a credible source in your category, and those pages are readable.
Change one thing and wait
When you act on what you find, change one thing — the structure of a page, the specificity of a claim, the presence of an answer that did not exist — and keep the question list fixed. Assistants update on their own schedule, so give it weeks. Anything faster than that is you reading noise.
Article FAQs
Still have questions?The short answers.
Can we see assistant traffic in analytics?
Partially and unreliably. Some assistant referrals arrive with a recognisable referrer and most arrive as direct traffic, so analytics will understate it by an unknown amount. Treat any figure you derive that way as a floor, not a measurement.
How often should we re-run the check?
Monthly is enough to see movement without mistaking noise for a trend. Answers vary between runs even with no changes on either side, so a single check tells you very little and three months of the same list tells you a lot.
