More of your future customers now ask an AI assistant before they ask Google. "What's a good organic dog shampoo for sensitive skin?" "Which invoicing app works for a two-person agency?" If ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI answers name your competitors and not you, you never even get a chance at that sale.
Before you buy a monthly AI search visibility checker, you can run the same check yourself for free. This guide shows you how to build a simple AI search visibility checker with a spreadsheet and a handful of prompts, how to read the results, and what to change on your site when you're missing. It's written for small Shopify stores, solo founders and small SaaS teams, and you can finish the first pass today.
What you'll need
- A list of the products, plans or services you sell
- A free account on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini (the free tiers are fine)
- A Google account and a private browser window
- A spreadsheet (Google Sheets works)
- About two hours for the first check, then 30 minutes a month
How to use a free AI search visibility checker, step by step
Step 1: Write the buyer prompts you want to show up for
An AI visibility check is only as good as the questions you test. Don't test your brand name. Test the questions a stranger asks right before they buy something like yours.
Write 15 to 25 prompts in three groups:
- "Best" prompts: "best natural deodorant for sensitive skin," "best Shopify app for size charts."
- Problem prompts: "how do I stop my candles from tunneling," "how can a small store send abandoned cart emails without a developer."
- Comparison prompts: "alternatives to [your biggest competitor]," "[competitor A] vs [competitor B] for a small team."
Pull the wording from your support inbox, pre-sale chats, product reviews and the "People also ask" box on Google. Then cut anything that's pure curiosity. If you can't tell whether a phrase is a buying question or a research question, run it through the free Keyword Intent Checker. Keep the buyer-intent ones; those are the prompts where being named actually turns into revenue.
Step 2: Set up your tracking sheet
Make one row per prompt and these columns:
| Prompt | Engine | Date | Are we mentioned? | Position in answer | Linked/cited? | Competitors named | Sources cited |
|---|
"Position" can be simple: 1 if you're the first brand named, 2 if second, and so on. "Sources cited" is the most useful column. It tells you which pages the AI leaned on to build its answer, and those are pages you can learn from or get onto.
Step 3: Run every prompt in each AI engine
Now run your checker by hand:
- ChatGPT: start a new chat for each prompt so earlier answers don't steer the next one. If search is available in your plan, note the sources it links.
- Perplexity: it lists its sources by default, which makes it the easiest engine to learn from.
- Gemini: run the same prompts and note any brands and links.
- Google: search each prompt in a private window and check whether an AI Overview or AI answer appears, and which sites it cites.
Paste the prompt exactly as written each time. AI answers change from run to run, so a single check can mislead you. Run your top 10 prompts twice, on different days, before you draw conclusions. What matters is the pattern: are you named often, sometimes or never?
Step 4: Score your AI search visibility
Once the sheet is filled in, work out three simple numbers:
- Mention rate: prompts where you're named, divided by total prompt runs.
- Citation rate: runs where one of your pages is linked as a source.
- Share of voice: your mentions compared with each competitor's mentions across the same prompts.
You don't need a dashboard for this. A count in the spreadsheet is enough. Write today's numbers at the top of the sheet; you'll compare against them next month.
To decide how much time this deserves, put a rough value on it. If even a few extra buyers a month found you through AI answers, what would that be worth? The free ROI Calculator helps you turn a traffic or conversion goal into a revenue number, so you can set a sensible budget and timeline instead of guessing.
Step 5: Find out why competitors get named and you don't
Look at the "Sources cited" column. For each prompt where a competitor is named and you aren't, open the cited pages and ask:
- Is there a page that answers this exact question in its first few sentences?
- Is it a comparison or "best of" page that lists the competitor?
- Is it a review site, directory or roundup article you're missing from?
- Does the competitor have a dedicated page for this use case, while you only have a product page?
Usually you'll see the same few gaps again and again. The free Content Gap Analyzer shows topics and pages your competitors rank for that you don't have, which is a fast way to confirm what to write next.
Step 6: Fix the gaps, then re-check monthly
Turn what you found into a short fix list:
- Write one answer-first page per missing prompt. Put the question in a heading, answer it plainly in the first two or three sentences, then add detail: steps, specs, prices, a short table, real photos.
- Make sure the pages can be read. AI engines and Google can't cite a page they can't crawl or index. Check that it isn't blocked, loads quickly, and has a clear title and description.
- Get onto the pages AI already trusts. If a roundup or directory keeps getting cited, see whether you can be listed on it honestly.
- Keep publishing. One page won't move your mention rate. A steady run of helpful, specific pages on your buyers' questions does.
Re-run the same prompts once a month in the same sheet. Same prompts, same engines, new date column. That's your free AI search visibility checker, and it shows you whether your fixes are working.
The game changer: Buyer Radar finds people asking right now
Showing up in AI answers and Google is the long game, and it compounds. But while that builds, there are people posting today asking for exactly what you sell, and most small businesses never see those posts.
That's where RankReactor is different. It's the one place where you get both sides in one plan: automated SEO, with articles and UGC-style videos that keep working for your rankings, plus an automatic buyer search called Buyer Radar.
Here's what Buyer Radar does:
- It finds and scores public posts on X and LinkedIn where people are asking for what you sell.
- It shows you the link to each original post, so you can see the full context.
- It drafts a reply or email for every lead.
- You send each one yourself with one click. Nothing is ever sent automatically.
So instead of only waiting for AI engines and Google to start naming you, you can reply to real buyers this week while your content builds in the background. Buyer Radar is included on paid plans, with monthly lead caps of 5 on Starter, 20 on Pro and 40 on Ultra. You can compare plans on the pricing page.
Common mistakes
- Testing only your brand name. Of course ChatGPT knows your name if you ask about it. The real test is whether it names you when a stranger asks a buying question.
- Trusting a single run. AI answers vary. Run your key prompts more than once before deciding you're missing or winning.
- Chasing every prompt at once. Pick the five buyer prompts closest to a sale and fix those first.
- Writing vague pages. Pages that never answer the question directly rarely get quoted. Lead with the answer.
- Skipping the sources column. The cited pages are your roadmap. Without them you're guessing.
- Not re-checking. Without a monthly re-run, you won't know if anything you changed made a difference.
What to do this week
- Write 15 to 25 buyer prompts and check their intent
- Set up the tracking sheet with the columns above
- Run your top 10 prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google
- Calculate your mention rate, citation rate and share of voice
- Pick the five biggest gaps and outline one answer-first page for each
- Put a monthly reminder in your calendar to re-run the same prompts
- Look at RankReactor if you want the content and Buyer Radar running for you while you work on the rest