Most SaaS founders check their Google rankings religiously. Very few have ever systematically checked whether ChatGPT or Perplexity mention their product. This is a gap - and it is surprisingly easy to close.

This article gives you a concrete, repeatable method to check your brand visibility in AI answers. You can start today with zero budget. We will also cover how to scale this once the manual process gets tedious.

Why This Matters Before You Start

Before diving in, a clarification on what you are actually measuring.

When you rank #5 on Google for a keyword, that is a specific, deterministic position. When ChatGPT mentions your brand, it is probabilistic - the same prompt can produce different results each time. LLMs are not deterministic.

This means your goal is not to find a single answer but to establish a mention rate: out of N times you ask a relevant question, how often does your brand appear?

A mention rate of 30% on a high-intent prompt means that roughly 3 out of 10 users asking that question in ChatGPT will see your product name. That is significant, measurable reach.

Step 1: Build Your Prompt List

Start by thinking like your target customer. What questions would someone ask an AI before buying your type of product?

For an AI writing tool targeting content teams, the prompt list might look like:

  • “What is the best AI writing tool for content teams?”
  • “Recommend some AI writing assistants for marketing teams”
  • “Top tools for AI-powered content creation in 2026”
  • “What alternatives to Jasper should I consider?”
  • “How do content teams use AI to write faster?”

Write 10-20 prompts in this format. Mix recommendation queries (“best X for Y”), comparison queries (“alternatives to Z”), and how-to queries that your product would help with.

Step 2: Run the Manual Check

Go to ChatGPT (or Claude, or Perplexity - check all three if you can) and run each prompt. Do this in a fresh conversation each time to avoid context carryover.

For each response, note:

  1. Is your brand mentioned? Yes/No
  2. If yes, at what position? (First, second, third in a list)
  3. What is the sentiment? (Positive framing, neutral mention, or negative)
  4. What other brands are mentioned alongside yours?

Keep a simple spreadsheet. Three columns: Prompt, Brand Mentioned (Y/N), Position, Notes.

Run each prompt 2-3 times on different days. This gives you a more reliable mention rate than a single data point.

Step 3: Understand What You Are Seeing

Once you have results for 10-15 prompts, you will likely see one of three patterns:

Pattern A - You are not mentioned at all. This is the most common result for products that are less than 2-3 years old or do not have significant third-party coverage. It does not mean your product is bad. It means AI systems do not have enough signal about your brand yet.

Pattern B - You appear in some prompts but not others. This is useful data. The prompts where you appear tell you which queries your current content and brand mentions cover. The prompts where you are absent are opportunities.

Pattern C - You appear consistently. If your brand shows up in 50%+ of relevant prompts, you have a meaningful AEO baseline. Now the work is about maintaining it, improving your position in lists, and expanding to cover more prompt variations.

Step 4: Check the Citation Sources (Perplexity Only)

Perplexity is particularly valuable because it shows its sources. When Perplexity mentions your brand, it typically cites the URLs it pulled from.

Run your prompts in Perplexity and look at the citations when your brand is mentioned. The sources that appear most often are the pages that are driving your visibility. If G2, a specific blog post, or a comparison site consistently appears, that tells you which citation sources matter for your category.

This is actionable: if Capterra keeps showing up but you are not on Capterra, that is a clear gap to fill.

Step 5: Track Your Competitors

For every prompt, also note which competitors appear. This is often the most eye-opening part of the exercise.

You might find that a competitor you consider less capable consistently appears in 4 out of 5 prompts because they have more third-party review coverage. You might find that a newer competitor you have not paid attention to has significant AI visibility in your category.

Competitor AEO data helps you understand:

  • Which brands the AI considers “established” in your space
  • Which citation sources your competitors have that you do not
  • Where there are gaps you can fill

Scaling This Process

The manual method works for a baseline check. But running 20 prompts Ă— 3 LLMs Ă— 3 times per week is 180 manual queries. That is not sustainable.

The pattern we see with SaaS founders who take AEO seriously: manual audit to establish baseline, then automated tracking to monitor changes.

AskRank’s free tier automates this process - running up to 10 prompts across two LLMs daily and tracking your mention rate over time. The paid tiers add more prompts, more LLMs, competitor tracking, and alerts when your visibility drops by more than 10%.

What to Do With What You Find

Once you have your baseline, the improvement work falls into three categories:

If you are not mentioned at all:

  • Check whether you are listed on G2, Capterra, and Product Hunt
  • Write clear category-defining content on your homepage and about page
  • Create or claim entries on comparison and review sites in your niche
  • Build out a blog with content that answers the exact prompts where you want visibility

If you are mentioned sometimes but not consistently:

  • Identify which prompts trigger mentions and which do not
  • Look at what content or citation sources are driving the mentions you do have
  • Replicate those patterns for the prompts where you are invisible

If you are consistently mentioned:

  • Track your position in recommendation lists (being #1 vs #4 matters)
  • Monitor sentiment across LLMs
  • Watch whether new competitors are appearing alongside you
  • Set up alerts for visibility drops

A Quick Note on Frequency

AI language models are updated periodically. The training data that determines what ChatGPT knows about your brand changes over time. A one-time audit is a snapshot. What matters is the trend.

This is why ongoing tracking is more valuable than a single check. A founder who sets up weekly monitoring and notices that their mention rate dropped from 45% to 25% over three months has actionable intelligence. A founder who checks once and moves on is flying blind.

The GEO vs AEO comparison covers how this fits into your broader search visibility strategy. For a data-driven look at what AI visibility actually means for your business metrics, see our piece on AI Overviews eating your clicks.