You can find out whether ChatGPT and Perplexity already recommend your firm in about ten minutes, with no paid tool required. Open each assistant, ask it the questions a prospective client would actually type (not your business name, the problem they're trying to solve), and read exactly what comes back.
If your firm doesn't appear, if a competitor does instead, or if the assistant gets a basic fact about you wrong, you now have a baseline. That baseline is the thing to establish before spending money on AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) content. You can't measure whether new content worked without knowing where you started.
What is an AI visibility check, and why do it before writing more content?
An AI visibility check is a short, repeatable test. You ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and ideally Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, the same handful of questions a potential client would type, in a private or incognito browser window. Then you write down exactly what each one says about your firm and your competitors. It's the AI-era cousin of a Google ranking check, except there's no rank number. There's just an answer, or no answer at all.
The confusion around how to do this is genuine and recent. A r/SEO_Experts thread from this month is titled, plainly: "I still do not understand how to track LLM (Large Language Model) visibility. Plz help me." Over in r/GEO_optimization, another recent thread asks marketers directly, "How's your AI search visibility looking heading into the end of the year?" The replies show plenty of people with no consistent method at all.
These aren't statistics. They're a sample of real questions that marketing and SEO practitioners are stuck on right now, which tells you the problem is common, not unusual to your firm.
Skipping the baseline and jumping straight to writing GEO content is like redesigning a website without checking current traffic first. You'll have no "before" to compare against, so even a genuinely successful content push will look like it did nothing. We cover the content side of GEO in more depth elsewhere on the blog; this piece is specifically about the measurement step that should come first.
Which prompts should I actually type into ChatGPT and Perplexity?
Type the questions a client asks before they know your firm's name, not your firm's name itself. Most professional-services buyers start with a category or a problem, and that's the moment an AI assistant is actually making a recommendation rather than just confirming one.
A workable starting set covers three types of prompt:
Category prompts: "best [service] in [your city/suburb]", "who should I use for [problem]"
Comparison prompts: "[competitor name] vs [another competitor name]", "alternatives to [competitor name]"
Direct-name prompts: "what do you know about [your firm name]", "is [your firm name] any good"
Run each prompt in both ChatGPT and Perplexity, since the two draw on different sources and often produce different answers for the same question. A r/AiChatGPT thread this month asked the broader question behind all of this: "What actually makes ChatGPT recommend one company over another?" Nobody in that thread has a definitive answer, which is exactly why testing directly, with your own prompts, matters more than guessing at the mechanism.
What does a good answer look like, and a bad one?
A good answer names your firm specifically and describes what you actually do correctly. It places you among the first few options rather than buried at the bottom of a long list. A good answer might also cite your website or a review platform as its source. You can sometimes see this if you ask the assistant to explain where it got the information.
A bad answer takes one of three shapes: your firm isn't mentioned at all, a competitor is mentioned in your place, or your firm is named but described inaccurately. Consider a law firm that ranks on page one of Google for "family lawyer Sydney" yet gets zero mentions when the identical question is put to Perplexity. That firm has a real visibility gap that Google Search Console would never show them, because Google rankings and AI assistant answers are now two separate battles.
A firm in that position is a reasonable candidate for the kind of focused support outlined on our law firms page. The same gap shows up just as often for accountants, financial advisers and consultancies.
What happens if the AI gets my firm wrong, or ignores it completely?
Being ignored by an AI assistant costs you a referral you never knew you missed. Being described wrongly is worse, because the person reading that wrong answer has no way of knowing it's inaccurate, and professional-services clients are choosing firms based partly on trust.
A r/GenEngineOptimization thread from this month shows exactly how bad this can get. The poster checked how ChatGPT saw their brand-new company: zero mentions across eleven category questions. When asked about the company by name, ChatGPT confidently described the business as a 2021 phone-case store, because that was who previously owned the domain.
The assistant wasn't uncertain or hedging. It stated the wrong answer as fact. For a law firm, accounting practice or financial advisory, a confidently wrong description (wrong services, wrong location, outdated ownership, a mixed-up competitor) is a credibility problem. The firm may never even learn about it unless someone runs the check.
This is the kind of drift that's hard to catch with a one-off audit, because AI models change their training data and retrieval sources on their own schedule, not yours. It's the sort of ongoing, repeatable monitoring that AI Smarter's AIOS (AI Operating System) methodology is built to keep on top of automatically. It beats relying on someone remembering to re-run the same five prompts every few weeks.
How is this different from tracking rankings in Google?
Google rankings are comparatively stable: a page holds roughly the same position for the same query over days or weeks, and tools like Search Console report it reliably. AI assistant answers are generated fresh for each query and can vary between sessions, between users, and between the assistant's own model updates. There's no single "position" to track the way there is in Google.
This instability is also why third-party AI visibility tools don't always agree with each other. A r/DigitalMarketing thread this month, titled "AI search brand visibility tools are giving me very different numbers," describes exactly that problem. A parallel r/GEO_optimization discussion asks outright whether SEO vs GEO is "a brand new beast" or marketing hype. Running your own manual prompt check doesn't replace a paid tool, but it's a useful sanity check against any tool that claims a precise score.
A firm that would rather not run this manually every week has another option. A Sydney AI automation agency like AI Smarter can fold the check into a broader monitoring programme instead.
How often should I repeat this, and what should I track over time?
Repeat the exact same set of prompts weekly, on the same day, in the same order. That way, the only thing that changes between checks is the AI's answer, not your method. Log four things each time: whether your firm was mentioned, where it appeared in the list, whether the description was accurate, and which competitors showed up instead.
A simple spreadsheet with one row per prompt per week is enough to start. Over a few months, that log tells you whether a GEO content push actually moved the needle and whether a competitor is gaining ground. It also flags when an assistant has started getting a fact about your firm wrong that needs correcting. See our work page for examples of firms we've helped close this kind of visibility gap once it's been measured properly.
Running this check once tells you where you stand today. Running it every week is what turns a one-off curiosity into a habit, and that habit is what actually protects your firm's visibility as these assistants keep answering more of the questions your next client is asking. If you'd rather not build and run this yourself, it's exactly what AI Smarter's GEO audit does: we test your firm, and your named competitors, across ChatGPT, Perplexity and the other major assistants, and hand you a clear picture of where you're showing up, where you're not, and what to fix first. Book a free initial AI consultation and we'll run that audit for you.