AI Visibility Checker: How to Test Your Brand for Free

You don't need a paid AI visibility checker to get your baseline. In about an hour, write 20-50 prompts your buyers actually type, run them through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and log whether you're mentioned, where you rank, and which sources get cited. A spreadsheet is your first checker; tools come later.

That baseline tells you whether AI assistants recommend you, recommend a competitor, or don't know you exist. Because the AI answer often IS the buyer's shortlist, "we've never checked" means flying blind on a growing acquisition channel.

Here's the full method, the three metrics to compute, and when it's worth graduating to a tool.

How do you build a buyer prompt panel?

Your AI visibility is only measurable against a fixed set of prompts. Guessing one or two questions tells you nothing. Build a panel that mirrors how buyers actually talk to an assistant:

• Category prompts: "best [your category] for [your ICP]", "top alternatives to [market leader]"
• Problem prompts: "how do I [problem your product solves]", "tools to automate [job to be done]"
• Comparison prompts: "[competitor A] vs [competitor B]", "[competitor] alternatives"
• Use-case prompts: "[category] for solo founders", "[category] that integrates with [stack]"

Aim for 20 prompts minimum, 50 if you serve multiple segments. Pull the phrasing from real sources: sales calls, support tickets, Reddit threads in your niche, and the "People also ask" boxes on Google. The closer a prompt is to what a real buyer types, the more honest your audit.

When we built our own panel, the biggest surprise came from a sales call: "reddit marketing tool that won't get me banned." Fear-phrased, zero keyword overlap, and it pulled a completely different answer than "best reddit marketing tool." Keyword tools won't surface those prompts; conversations will.

Write them all down before testing. If you improvise prompts mid-session, you'll unconsciously steer toward questions you win.

Run every prompt on 4 AI surfaces

Test each prompt on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. They use different retrieval systems and different source mixes, so your visibility can vary wildly between them. Being everywhere on Perplexity and invisible on ChatGPT is common. The first time we ran our own audit, Perplexity named us on most comparison prompts while ChatGPT didn't mention us once, same prompts, same week, different Reddit threads retrieved.

A few rules to keep the data clean:

1. Use fresh sessions. Log out or use a temporary chat so your history doesn't bias answers.
2. Run each prompt as-is. No follow-ups, no "what about [your brand]?". You're measuring the default answer a stranger gets.
3. Copy the full answer, not just the verdict. You'll need the source list later.
4. Note the date. AI answers shift week to week; undated data is useless for tracking.

Expect 60-90 minutes for a 25-prompt panel across four surfaces. Tedious, but you only do it manually once to get your baseline.

Log mentions, position, and sources in a spreadsheet

One row per prompt-per-surface. Six columns do the job:

That last column is where the leverage hides. When you see which pages the models retrieve, you know exactly where to earn a presence. In our experience, Reddit threads dominate the source lists for commercial "best tool" queries, here's why Reddit dominates AI citations.

Reddit is consistently the most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for commercial queries, ahead of Wikipedia and every review site.

That's not a hunch. Public citation studies like Profound's put Reddit at the top of AI-cited domains, with roughly 40% of sources cited on commercial queries coming from Reddit. The models are paying for that data too: Google signed a $60M-a-year content licensing deal with Reddit in 2024, and OpenAI followed with its own Reddit partnership the same year.

What are the 3 AI visibility metrics that matter?

Once the spreadsheet is full, compute three numbers that turn a pile of screenshots into a benchmark you can track monthly.

Visibility rate

The percentage of prompt-surface combinations where your brand appears at all. 25 prompts on 4 surfaces = 100 tests. Mentioned in 12 of them? Your visibility rate is 12%. This is your headline number and the first thing to move.

Average position

Across the answers where you do appear, where do you rank on average? AI answers are shortlists, and buyers weight the first name heavily. Moving from "fifth tool mentioned" to "first or second" often matters more than raising raw visibility.

Citation share

Of all sources cited across your panel, what percentage point to pages where your brand is present, your site, docs, or threads mentioning you? This is the input metric: citations feed future answers. It's closely related to share of model voice, which measures your mentions against competitors' across the same panel.

Recompute all three monthly with the same panel. The trend is the signal; a single snapshot is just a starting point.

When should you switch to an AI visibility checker?

Switch when tracking becomes the bottleneck, not before. The manual method breaks down once you want weekly runs, multiple regions, or competitor tracking across 50+ prompts. Re-running 200 tests by hand every week isn't a strategy, it's a punishment.

Free option first: Readyt's GEO Report runs a prompt panel for your brand across the major AI engines and shows your mentions and cited sources at no cost. Fair caveat: it's a young product focused on Reddit-driven visibility, not a full multi-surface enterprise tracker.

If you need heavier tooling, Peec AI and Profound both do continuous multi-engine tracking with competitor benchmarks, at enterprise-ish pricing. Semrush's AI toolkit is a reasonable pick if you already live in Semrush. Choose based on cadence and budget, not logos.

Whichever route you take, the audit is only step one. To actually move the numbers, work the sources the models cite; here's how to get your SaaS recommended by ChatGPT.

FAQ

Paul-Marie Hamon

Founder @ Readyt

Paul-Marie is the founder of Readyt, the Reddit growth platform for SaaS. He has generated 16K€+ in pre-sales in 2 months using nothing but Reddit, and now helps founders turn Reddit threads into their #1 acquisition channel.