More than a third of US consumers now start product research inside an AI assistant instead of Google, and 71% of software buyers use AI chatbots to compare vendors. In an AI answer there is no page two — the model names one or two businesses as "the answer." If you're not one of them, you don't exist for that buyer.
Here's how to check where you stand, in plain steps.
Open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini and ask each the way a real buyer would:
Note whether your business is named, where you rank, and who shows up instead. Run each a few times — answers vary.
AI assistants don't just crawl your homepage; they synthesize from sources they trust. Three signals matter most:
llms.txt, Organization and FAQ schema (JSON-LD). This is how a model cleanly resolves *who you are* and *what you do*.llms.txt summarizing your business and key pages.AI answers shift as models and sources update. Checking once isn't enough; the businesses that win re-check regularly and move when a competitor starts outranking them.
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Tools like Cited run these buying-intent prompts for you across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, score your visibility 0–100, show who's cited instead of you, and generate the exact fixes (llms.txt, schema, FAQ blocks). The scan is free; monitoring starts at $39/mo.