How to Check If AI Search Engines Are Recommending Your Business

Right now, somebody is asking ChatGPT for the best supplier of what you sell. They are not typing it into Google and scrolling. They are asking a question and reading one answer.

That answer names two or three businesses. If yours is not one of them, you did not lose a ranking. You were never in the room. And unlike a Google result, there is no page two to be on.

Most advice about this jumps straight to what to change. This guide starts one step earlier, with the question almost nobody actually answers first: is it happening to you or not? Once you know where you stand, the fix follows from the answer you got.

Why This Is Suddenly Worth Measuring

Two things changed. AI answers now appear on a large share of Google searches, and a growing number of people skip search entirely and ask an assistant instead.

The consequence is uncomfortable. In traditional search you could see your position, so you knew where you stood. In an AI answer there is no position. There is a shortlist, and you are on it or you are not. Nothing in Google Analytics tells you which.

The good news is that checking costs nothing but an hour of your time, and the answer is genuinely useful, because what you do next depends entirely on which of four situations you are in.

The Four Rungs of AI Visibility

This is the part most guides skip, and it is the reason people do the wrong work. There are four separate things that could be happening, and they need different fixes.

Here is the insight worth the whole article. Citation and recommendation are different problems with different solutions. Citation comes from your own content, so you control it. Recommendation comes mostly from what other people say about you, so you do not.

A business can be quoted constantly, because it wrote a good explainer, and still never be suggested when somebody asks who to hire. Publishing more of your own content will not fix that. It is a common and expensive mistake.

How to Check, in About an Hour

No tools needed for the first pass. You need a list of questions and somewhere to write the answers.

Two things to watch for while you read, because they tell you more than a yes or no.

First, look at what kind of source it used. If the answer cites directories, review sites and comparison articles rather than the businesses' own websites, that tells you the game in your category is being decided off-site.

Second, look at whether the AI hedged about you. An answer that recommends you but adds "you may want to confirm their current credentials" is telling you that a claim on your site could not be verified anywhere else.

If You Are Not Being Found at All

If your business and your website are entirely absent across twenty questions, start with the least glamorous possibility: the crawlers cannot read your site.

Each AI platform uses its own crawler, and each one can be blocked. Open yourdomain.co.ke/robots.txt in a browser and look for any rule that disallows these:

Crawler	Belongs to	Blocking it means
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot	OpenAI, ChatGPT	ChatGPT cannot cite you
PerplexityBot	Perplexity	Perplexity cannot cite you
ClaudeBot	Anthropic, Claude	Claude cannot cite you
Google-Extended	Google AI features	Reduced AI Overview presence
CCBot	Common Crawl	Training corpora only

This is a real decision rather than an obvious one. Blocking these crawlers does keep your content out of AI systems, which some businesses genuinely want. But it also removes any chance of being recommended by them. You cannot have one without the other.

The second common cause is that your content only exists after JavaScript runs. If your services and prices are loaded by a script rather than present in the HTML, many crawlers see an empty page. The quick test is to disable JavaScript in your browser and reload. What remains is roughly what a machine sees.

If You Are Found but Not Quoted

This is the most common situation, and it is a content structure problem rather than a content quality problem.

AI systems do not quote pages. They quote passages. A paragraph that only makes sense after reading the three above it cannot be lifted out, so it does not get used, however good it is.

Four habits make a page quotable:

• Answer the question in the first two sentences of a section, then explain. If the answer is in paragraph four, it will not be found.
• Write self-contained passages. Each one should still be true and clear if somebody read only it.
• Use headings phrased as questions. "How much does an online shop cost in Kenya" gets matched to a real query. "Our Pricing Philosophy" does not.
• Put comparisons in tables and processes in numbered lists. Both are far easier for a machine to extract cleanly than prose.

Two things reliably increase how often a page gets quoted: specific numbers, and sources for them. "Websites in Kenya start from KES 20,000" is quotable. "Affordable pricing" is not, because it says nothing a machine can repeat.

Structured data helps here too, by labelling your facts explicitly rather than leaving them to be inferred. Our guide to schema markup covers how to add it.

If You Are Quoted but Never Recommended

You wrote the explainer. The AI quotes it happily. Then somebody asks who to hire and it names three other businesses.

This is the hardest rung, and the reason is structural. When an AI decides who to recommend, it does not weigh your opinion of yourself very heavily. It looks for what independent sources say. Directories, review platforms, forum threads, comparison articles, press.

Which means the work is off your website:

1. Directory listings with real depth. Being listed is not the same as being ranked within a listing. Most directories order by review volume and recency, so a profile with two old reviews loses to one with fifteen recent ones.
2. Reviews, continuously. Not a burst once a year. Recency counts, and a steady trickle beats a campaign.
3. Verifiable credentials. If you are a certified partner of something, be findable in that partner's own directory. A claim only on your own site is a claim an AI will hedge about.
4. Genuine participation where your customers talk. Real answers to real questions. Not seeded threads, which are both obvious and against most platforms' rules.

The Files Written for Machines

Two small files help AI systems and shopping agents understand you without guessing.

llms.txt is a plain text file at your site root that summarises what you do, who you serve, what you charge and where your key pages are. Google has said it does not need one. Other engines and agents do read it when it is there, and it costs an afternoon.

A readable pricing file matters more than people expect. AI agents increasingly compare providers on a buyer's behalf, and an agent cannot compare a price it cannot read. If your pricing is behind a contact form, or drawn by a script, you get filtered out of that comparison silently. A simple page or markdown file with your tiers, in plain text, keeps you in it.

Tools That Track It for You

Do the manual check first, because it teaches you what the answers actually look like in your category. Once you want a trend rather than a snapshot, monitoring tools exist that run a set of prompts across several platforms on a schedule and report whether you appeared.

What to expect from them, honestly. They will tell you how often you were mentioned and who was mentioned instead, which is the useful part. They are less good at telling you why, and none of them can promise placement. Treat the output as a thermometer, not a diagnosis.

One thing no tool covers well: there is no equivalent of Search Console for AI answers. Google has confirmed there is no AI-specific reporting, so your own records are the only history you will have. That is a good reason to start the sheet now rather than later.

What to Check Every Month

Expect movement you did not cause. Retrieval behaviour changes without notice, and a source that was cited everywhere one month can vanish the next. That volatility is exactly why a single check is close to worthless and a running record is worth keeping.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if ChatGPT mentions my business?

Ask it. Open ChatGPT with web search on and type the question a customer would ask, such as best web designers in Nairobi. Read whether you appear, whether you are linked, and who appears instead. Repeat for twenty questions and write the answers down so you can compare next month.

What is the difference between being cited and being recommended?

Being cited means the AI used your page as a source, often for a fact. Being recommended means it put your business on the shortlist. Citation comes from your own content. Recommendation comes mostly from what other sites say about you, which is why a business can be cited constantly and still never be suggested.

Why does my business not appear in AI answers at all?

The most common reason is that the AI crawlers cannot read your site. Check your robots.txt for rules blocking GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended. If any of those are disallowed, that platform cannot cite you no matter how good your content is.

Does blocking AI crawlers protect my content?

It stops those crawlers reading your pages, which also stops them recommending you. It is a real trade-off rather than a free win. A middle path is allowing the crawlers that search and cite, such as GPTBot and PerplexityBot, while blocking training-only crawlers like CCBot.

What is llms.txt and do I need one?

It is a plain text file at the root of your site that summarises what you do, who you serve and what you charge, written for AI systems to read. Google does not require it. Other engines and AI shopping agents do read it when it exists, so it is cheap insurance rather than a must.

How often should I check my AI visibility?

Monthly is enough for most businesses. AI answers change when the underlying retrieval changes, which happens without warning, so a single check tells you very little. The value is in the trend across the same twenty questions over several months.

Can I pay to appear in AI answers?

No. There is no advertising slot inside an AI answer today. Appearing is a function of whether your content can be read and extracted, and of what independent sources say about you. Anyone selling guaranteed AI placement is selling something that does not exist.