We Built a Free Tool to Check If AI Actually Recommends You
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are answering "who should I hire for X near me?" right now — without most business owners in the room, and without most of them ever checking. So we built a free worksheet that walks you through checking it yourself, in about ten minutes.
What it actually does
The AI Citation Checker is a guided worksheet, not an automated scraper. You enter your business name and category, copy a set of real customer-style questions into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — four separate chats — and read what each one actually says back. Then you check a box if your business was mentioned, judge the sentiment yourself, and the tool generates a shareable "citation receipt" summarizing what you found.
That's a deliberate design choice, not a limitation we're glossing over. We could have built something that claims to auto-detect sentiment with a hidden scoring model, but that would mean asking you to trust a black box instead of reading the actual response an AI gave about your business. We'd rather you spend the ten minutes and see it yourself.
In the interest of not overselling this the way an agency pitch deck would:
- It's a point-in-time snapshot. AI answers change from one chat to the next, so a "not mentioned" today isn't permanent, and a "mentioned" today isn't guaranteed to repeat tomorrow.
- It doesn't monitor anything continuously. There's no dashboard, no alerts, no ongoing tracking — you run it when you want a read, the same way you'd run a PageSpeed test.
- Nothing is sent to a server. It runs entirely in your browser; nothing you paste is transmitted or stored anywhere, including by us.
Why we built it instead of just writing about it
We'd already written about how Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) differs from traditional SEO — AEO optimizes for a single generated sentence that either includes your business or doesn't, instead of a ranked list you can watch move over weeks. The problem is that most of what gets sold as "AI visibility tracking" is exactly that: sold, at a price point most small businesses can't justify for something they've never even confirmed is a real gap for them.
So before recommending anyone spend money closing a gap, we built the free version of the first step — actually checking whether the gap exists — and shipped it as a standalone tool rather than a lead-gen form with results locked behind a signup.
- What it costsFree, no account, no upgrade tier
- What it checksChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — one at a time, by hand
- How long it takesAbout ten minutes
- What happens to your dataNothing — it never leaves your browser
- Is the sentiment auto-scoredNo — you read the answer and judge it yourself
- Does it monitor over timeNo — it's a snapshot, run it whenever you want a fresh read
If a claim about our own work wouldn't survive us checking it, we don't publish it. That standard is why this tool tells you what it can't do as plainly as what it can.
Four questions, four AI assistants, ten minutes. See whether your business is part of the answer.
Open the free AI Citation Checker →