Score your brand's eligibility to be cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Pick the signals you have in place.
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A growing share of commercial research now happens inside conversational assistants and AI summaries rather than in a list of ten blue links. The person asking which agency handles a particular problem in a particular market may never see a results page at all. They see a synthesized answer naming two or three companies, and everyone else is invisible regardless of where they rank.
This changes what optimization means. Traditional search rewards the page that best matches a query. Answer engines reward sources that state facts clearly, in structured and unambiguous language, and that are corroborated elsewhere. A page can rank well and still never be cited, because its key information is implied by design rather than stated plainly.
This checker looks for the characteristics that make a site usable as a source: whether core facts about the business are stated explicitly, whether structured data describes the entity properly, whether content answers questions directly, and whether the business is described consistently across the wider web. These are the inputs available to a model assembling an answer about you.
These characteristics recur across the pages we see cited in AI answers, and they differ meaningfully from classic ranking factors.
Content that answers the question in its first two sentences and then explains is far more usable to a model than content that builds toward a conclusion. Long introductions that delay the answer are a habit inherited from an era when time on page mattered more than clarity.
A page that says the firm serves a named set of cities, was founded in a specific year, and specializes in named services gives a model something to state. A page that conveys the same information through imagery and tone gives it nothing it can safely repeat.
Organization, service, and frequently asked question markup help systems understand what a business is and what it offers without inferring it from prose. Markup is not a ranking trick here; it is the difference between being parsed correctly and being parsed approximately.
Models weight information that appears consistently in several places. A claim that exists only on your own website is treated with more caution than one reflected in directories, publications, and third-party profiles that agree with each other.
Some sites block the crawlers that AI systems use, sometimes without realizing it, through inherited robots directives or aggressive bot protection. A site that cannot be fetched cannot be cited, and this is the most complete failure mode available.
It overlaps substantially and diverges in emphasis. Both reward clarity, authority, and technical accessibility. Answer engine optimization places far more weight on explicit factual statements, structured data, and consistent corroboration, and far less on ranking position for a specific keyword.
Ask them, systematically and repeatedly. Build a list of the questions your buyers would realistically ask, run them across the major assistants on a regular schedule, and record which businesses are named. Occasional spot checks produce noise rather than a trend.
That is a genuine strategic choice with a real trade-off. Blocking protects content from being used without attribution and guarantees you will not be cited. For most service businesses, being findable is worth considerably more than the content protection.
Only if it is clearer and more specific than what already exists. Volume alone does not help, and thin repetitive content actively harms the corroboration signal by making the site look automated rather than authoritative.
No, and creating a parallel content set is a mistake. The same page should serve both, written so the direct answer comes first and the supporting detail follows. That structure happens to suit human readers too, most of whom are scanning for the answer rather than reading in order.
Anywhere from days to several months, depending on how each system refreshes its sources and whether it retrieves live pages or relies on a training snapshot. Structured data and crawl access changes tend to register fastest; corroboration across third-party sources is the slowest to build and the most durable.