You can check whether AI recommends your business in about forty minutes, and three of the four places to look are free reports you already have access to and probably have never opened. One of them landed on every website in the world three days ago.
Most advice on this question sends you straight to a paid dashboard. That is backwards for a contractor or a home services owner. Start with the first-party data, because it is free, it comes from the companies that actually serve the answers, and it tells you things no third-party tracker can see. Then do the hand-run audit, which is the only way to learn what the answer actually says about you.
The order to check things in
The four instruments answer four different questions, and they get progressively more expensive in your time:
| # | Where | What it answers | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Search Console, generative AI report | Is Google's AI showing my pages at all, and which ones? | 5 min |
| 2 | Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance | What exact phrases pull my pages into AI answers? | 10 min |
| 3 | GA4, AI Assistant channel | Is anyone actually arriving from an assistant? | 5 min |
| 4 | Hand-run prompt audit | Does the answer name me, and is what it says true? | 20 min |
Do them in that order. The first three take twenty minutes combined and cost nothing. The fourth is the only one that tells you what a customer actually reads, which is why the vendor blogs jump to it first, and why they then sell you software to do it.
If all four come back empty, stop measuring and check the plumbing instead: our free AI visibility check tells you whether the assistants' crawlers can read your pages at all. A site that renders its content in JavaScript looks blank to every crawler except Google's, and no amount of auditing will surface a page nobody can fetch.
1. The Search Console report that just reached everybody
Google announced the Search Generative AI performance reports on June 3, 2026, rolling out to a subset of sites for testing. The help documentation now carries a plain note at the top: as of August 31, 2026, these insights are live on all websites worldwide. If you have a Search Console property, you have this report.
It sits at Performance, then the generative AI view, and it shows impressions (how often links to your site appeared in a generative AI feature on Search), the specific pages that appeared, and a breakdown by country, device and date.
Be clear about what it does not give you, because this is where the excitement usually outruns the product. There are no clicks and no queries. You cannot see what anybody typed. It covers Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode only, so it is silent on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot, and Google explicitly excludes Search Labs experiments. The usual 1,000 row limit applies.
Watch out
The report is a Search Console view with an export button, not an API dimension. I queried a live property's Search Analytics API by search appearance on September 3, 2026 and got no generative AI breakout rows back at all. If you have a script or a spreadsheet pulling Search Console data automatically, it is not picking this up. Export it by hand.
What to actually do with it: sort by page and look at which URLs are earning AI impressions. For a local service business the pattern is usually blunt. One or two specific job pages carry almost everything, and the homepage carries almost nothing. That tells you which page shape Google's AI finds usable, and it is nearly always the narrow one.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools, where you can see the actual phrases
This is the most underused free instrument in the entire category, and it matters more than its market share suggests, because ChatGPT's live search has long leaned on Bing's index.
Microsoft launched AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools as a public preview on February 10, 2026. It reports on Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner AI experiences, and it gives you four things: total citations, average cited pages per day, page-level citation activity with a trend line, and grounding queries, the key phrases the AI used when retrieving the content it cited. Microsoft is explicit that grounding queries are a sample of overall activity, not the complete set.
That last one is the prize. Grounding queries are the closest thing to prompt-level data anyone gives away for free. Google's report shows you zero queries; Bing shows you a sample of the real language behind your citations.
In June 2026 Microsoft expanded it globally with four more previews. Intents classifies each grounding query into categories including Informational, Commercial, Navigational, Local and others, so you can see whether you are being pulled into "how does this work" answers or "who should I hire" answers. Topics clusters related queries into themes. Citation share shows what percentage of all citations for a given grounding query went to your site, and Microsoft is careful to call it observational rather than a ranking. Compare overlays a previous period.
It is worth noting how far under the radar this sits. On r/aeo, a practitioner running professional AI visibility tracking recommended "Bing's new AI tracking in Webmaster Tools" while adding that it "does not include traffic or actual prompts". Half right: there is still no traffic data, but grounding queries have been in the product since launch.
3. GA4, and the honest size of the prize
Until recently, seeing assistant traffic in GA4 meant building a custom channel group with a regex for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and the rest. Most of the tutorials still ranking for this walk you through exactly that. They are out of date. On May 13, 2026, Google Analytics added a native AI Assistant default channel group that separates traffic from recognized AI chatbots automatically. Open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and look for it in the default channel group breakdown.
Now the part nobody selling a dashboard leads with. AI referral traffic averages roughly 1.08% of all website traffic across industries, with ChatGPT driving about 87.4% of it, per Conductor's 2026 AEO and GEO benchmarks. If your site gets 1,000 sessions a month, you are looking for about ten visits. That is a number small enough that a single busy week distorts it.
Two conclusions follow, and they pull in opposite directions. Do not buy a tracking subscription to measure ten sessions. But do not conclude the channel is fake either: referral share is a lagging indicator, because people read the answer, then go and verify you somewhere else. That verification click lands in GA4 as branded Google search or direct traffic, and the assistant that started it gets no credit. This attribution hole is genuinely unsolved, so anyone showing you a confident count of AI-sourced revenue is showing you a model, not a measurement.
If the four checks turn up a gap and you would rather not spend the next six months closing it yourself, that is the work we do. Our GSEO service runs the audit, finds the pages and third-party sources deciding your category, and gets your business onto them.
4. The hand-run audit, done with enough runs to mean something
Here is where nearly every guide on this topic goes wrong. They tell you to write ten prompts, run each once or twice across three engines, and record the result. The arithmetic does not support that.
SparkToro and Gumshoe ran the largest public test of this: 600 volunteers ran 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI a combined 2,961 times in late 2025. There is under a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google AI, asked 100 times, returns the same list of brands in any two responses, and closer to 1 in 1,000 for the same list in the same order. Their conclusion: visibility percentage across many runs is a defensible metric, and any tool reporting a "ranking position in AI" is, in Rand Fishkin's words, full of baloney. A separate August 2026 study of 309 ChatGPT answers found identical questions returned an identical set of sources just 8 times out of 100 paired runs, with the source lists overlapping 38% on average.
A commenter on r/localseo put the practitioner version more briefly, asking an owner: "Are you tracking prompts or just trying to manually plug them in yourself? The inconsistency is pretty wild from day-to-day."
Why a local business needs fewer runs than a software brand
Now the part that works in your favour, and that I have not seen anyone point out.
The SparkToro data shows that consistency is not uniform across topics. It tracks how many candidate entities exist in the space. Ask for recently published science fiction novels and the answers scatter wildly, because there are thousands of candidates. Ask for Volvo dealerships in Los Angeles, where there are fewer than a dozen, and the responses correlate tightly. Their cancer care example makes the point: City of Hope appeared in 69 of 71 ChatGPT answers, a 97% visibility rate, even while its position in the list bounced around.
A single trade in a single city is about the narrowest candidate set there is. There are not thousands of garage door companies in Oakville. There are a couple of dozen. That means your mention rate converges much faster than it would for a SaaS brand fighting in a category with hundreds of players, and a hand-run audit that would be statistically hopeless for a software marketer is workable for you.
The procedure
Write five questions, in a customer's words. Not about you, about the job. "Who should I call for a garage door spring that snapped in Oakville", not "best garage door company". Never put your business name in the prompt, because naming yourself plants the answer you were trying to test.
Run each one ten times in a fresh session. Use a temporary or logged-out chat with memory off. If you have ever discussed your own business with the assistant, your history contaminates the result and you learn what it knows about you rather than what it tells a stranger.
Record two columns, not one. Mentioned (your name is in the answer text) and cited (your URL is listed as a source). They fail independently. For a local business the mention is what matters, because that is what puts you on the shortlist a customer acts on.
Read the rate like this. These bands are a working rule of thumb built on the consistency data above, not a published significance threshold:
| Named in | Read it as | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 2 of 10 | Effectively absent | The gap is off-site. Find the pages naming your competitors. |
| 3 to 6 of 10 | In the pool, not the default | You are a candidate. More third-party corroboration moves it. |
| 7 to 10 of 10 | You own the query | Protect it. Check accuracy and move to the next question. |
Then write down who did get named. This is the highest-value output of the whole audit and most owners skip it. Ask the assistant to list every source it used, with URLs. For local questions the answer is usually two or three roundup posts, a directory and a review site. One r/localseo commenter, working on auto glass, described it plainly: ChatGPT "tends to pull from those best auto glass shops in town roundup posts, so landing on a couple of those does more than your GBP does." That turns a vague ambition into a short outreach list you can work through in an afternoon.
The check that matters more than any of this
Before you spend a minute on whether you get mentioned, spend five on whether what the assistant says about you is true.
An owner on r/smallbusiness named the failure mode better than any vendor page: "it's not just whether you get named, it's whether what it says about you is correct. The failure mode that quietly costs money is being recommended and then handed a phone number that's been disconnected for two years, or hours from before you changed them. The customer never calls and you never find out, there's no dashboard for it."
That is the whole problem in three sentences. A missing mention costs you a hypothetical customer. A wrong phone number costs you a customer who was already sold.
So run a second, shorter set of prompts that ask for facts rather than recommendations. What are the hours for [your business]. What is the phone number for [your business]. What areas does [your business] serve. Do they do [the service you stopped offering last year]. Then compare each answer against your real records.
When the answer is wrong, the source is rarely your own website. BrightLocal's study of 800 local business searches in ChatGPT found business websites supplied 58% of sources, third-party mentions 27% and directories 15%. A stale directory entry can outvote your homepage, which is why fixing your site alone often changes nothing. Go and find the oldest record about you, which is almost never the one you check.
By the numbers
BrightLocal also found the directory picture is nothing like the Google one. Yelp, Facebook and Google Maps did not appear as directory sources at all in that study, while Three Best Rated supplied 24% of all directory sources and Expertise 18%. Trades were split: "best electrician" pulled 62% directory results, while most other trade searches were dominated by business websites. Which directories matter is trade-specific, and the famous ones are not automatically the ones being read.
A quick way to find your gap, courtesy of an r/localseo commenter: search for your trade and city restricted to the community sites, using site: filters for reddit.com, nextdoor.com and the big lead directories. If your competitors show up in those results and you do not, that is your citation gap in one search.
What a reading actually means
Two calibrations before you act on any number you collect.
Volatility is normal. Passionfruit's analysis of 11.2 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity over seven months found that 68% of the queries that produced a citation in one month did not produce one the next, and only 7% stayed visible for four months or longer. If you drop out of an answer between March and April, the base rate says nothing happened. Read the trend across a quarter.
Ignore position entirely. Whether you are named first or fourth in a list carries no information, on the evidence above. The metric is the rate, and only the rate.
A sceptical position is worth holding alongside this. On r/aeo, one commenter dismissed the whole tracking category: "The category is fundamentally broken because it's impossible to do what you (plural) claim to be able to do." They are wrong about visibility rate, which the SparkToro work rescued, but right about everything downstream of it: rank position, sentiment scores out of 100 and confident revenue attribution are all theatre.
The forty-minute quarterly routine
- Open the generative AI report in Search Console. Note total impressions and the top five pages. Export it.
- Open AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools. Read the grounding queries and write down any phrase you did not expect. Check Intents for whether you are showing up in Local and Commercial or only Informational.
- Open GA4, Traffic acquisition, and note sessions from the AI Assistant channel.
- Run five customer-voice questions ten times each in a fresh session. Record mentioned and cited as separate counts.
- Run five factual questions about your hours, phone, service area and services. Fix whatever is wrong at the source, not on your website.
- Write down every business named instead of you, and every source URL the assistant lists. That is next quarter's outreach list.
Same questions every quarter. The value is entirely in the comparison, so changing the questions destroys it.
What to skip
Do not buy a tool on the first pass. The free reports are proportionate to a channel that is currently about 1% of your traffic.
Do not chase a visibility score. A number out of 100 from a vendor repackages the same non-deterministic sampling you can do yourself, wrapped in false precision.
Do not test while logged into an account that knows you. It is the most common way owners convince themselves they are visible when they are not.
Do not check one engine and generalise. The engines disagree about the same business more often than you would expect, and the fix differs for each. For the mechanics rather than the measurement, how to rank on ChatGPT covers the retrieval side, and why your website is not showing up in ChatGPT covers the diagnosis when the answer is a flat zero.
Checking is cheap, it takes forty minutes a quarter, and almost nobody in the trades does it. Most owners find out that an assistant has been sending customers to a competitor, or handing out an old phone number, from a customer rather than from a report.