How to Track Your AI Visibility: Does AI Actually Recommend You?

AI visibility is whether tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overview, Gemini and Claude name you when someone asks for a recommendation in your industry. Here is how to track your AI visibility for free, without a single paid tool. I’m going to show you how to run a short set of searches, logged out in an incognito window, and watch who these systems recommend and what they say about you. Right now, at this moment, AI is recommending someone in your niche when a potential client asks who they should hire. The only question is whether that someone is you or a competitor.

Most people have never checked and are counting on their social media visibility to pull through for them, but it will not. The ones who do this search are usually surprised. This is the exact process I run myself over and over, and it is the first thing I have every close proximity clients do before we move forward on any actions to diversify their visibility. And we all know you cannot fix what isn’t measured.

Why the wording of the questions changes who AI recommends

Here is the thing almost nobody teaches: AI recommends completely different people depending on how precisely the question is phrased.

Asking a generic question like “who should I hire as a coach” and the answer is wide open, especially if you have had multiple conversations with your own AI tool about different areas of your life. Is it a life coach, a business coach, a baseball coach? The tool has zero clue what you mean, so it reaches for the biggest, most obvious names maybe having to do with a recent conversation. You will almost never appear there, that isn’t a failure, it’s just too broad.

Ask a specific question that matches your actual lane, and the picture changes entirely. I have a client in motorsports marketing. Ask “who do you recommend for motorsports marketing” and she comes up. I have another client in stormwater marketing. “Ask who do you recommend in stormwater marketing?” and she or her husband comes up. Ask “who do you recommend as a marketing agency” and neither is coming up, unless AI knows already that you are heavily involved in one of those industries.

So this exercise isn’t really about “am I visible to AI, yes or no” In some form, you probably are. The real questions are: how specific did the search have to be before your name or brand appears and would your actual buyer go that deep and get that specific? That is what you are tracking in this do it yourself audit.

Before you start: log out and watch the memory trap

Two rules before you type anything, or your results will lie to you.

First, search logged out or in an incognito window, ideally on a desktop so you can save the results. Logged-in results can be flattering by your own history and location so they show you a friendlier picture than a stranger gets. You want to know what a potential client sees, not what your own account sees.

Second, watch for the memory trap on the AI tools. Your AI knows you better than anyone. If ChatGPT or Gemini already knows you from past chats, it may name you because it remembers you, not because you are genuinely recommended. That is a false win, and it is the single most common mistake people make when they run this. You will check for it directly in the steps below. If for some reason you cannot log out, or use a free version, ask it directly to pull publicly and forget other chats and conversations you’ve had.

Save everything as you go. Most AI platforms let you download the chat as a PDF and for Google you can grab the whole page with a free extension called GoFullPage. Date each file so you know when you rerun this in 30 days, you can see exactly what changed.

Step 1: Check Google’s AI Overview (generic then specific)

Open a clean or incognito Google window and search a generic version of what you do. For me that is “who would you recommend as a visibility strategist.” Look at the AI Overview at the top. Are you in it?

When I ran that, my name did not come up at all. It gave four names, none of them mine. That is the generic result and is normal, but doesn’t mean I am not going to stop trying to rank higher in that generic question.

Now get more specific. Add who you serve and how. I searched “visibility strategist for female coaches” once my name came up and another time it didn’t. Then I searched “visibility strategist for female coaches for the feed, search and AI” and my name was top of the list time and time again. The point is the first time I didn’t rank, it is that I had to be very specific to appear, and that tells me exactly which phrasing I won and which I still need to work on.

Read the AI Overview closely when you appear. Is what it says about you accurate? That matters as much as whether you show up.

Step 2: Run it in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

Even if you don’t actually use all 3 of these AI tools, you have no idea which is your ideal person's favorite and these days that changes. Each one matters and each one can answer differently, they all 3 have different algorithms too. Ask it publicly: “if someone asked you for [what you do], who would you recommend?”

Then run the memory check, if you are still logged in. When I asked ChatGPT for a visibility strategist for female coaches it put me at the top. When I asked directly “did this recommendation come from anything you previously knew about me” it said yes and said it was influenced by prior conversations. I told it to ignore previous conversations and everything it knew about me from our chats and asked again on a blind test. On the blind version I came up second instead of first, not bad but also I wanted the real actual results.

Gemini is worth prioritizing because so much of what you do lives inside Google products, from search to YouTube. When I asked Gemini for the generic version, my name did not appear at all. It listed five names. When I asked the specific version “visibility strategist for female coaches across feed, search and AI,” it named me as the number one full-spectrum choice, it’s words not mine and linked my website. That is exactly what you want to see: the machine restating your own positioning back as fact exactly like you say it.

Claude had no memory of me enabled, so when it named me first for the specific query and I asked whether it was drawing on anything it knew about me from our chats, it confirmed it didn’t know who I was outside of that particular chat. That is the cleaned kind of result, because there is no history to flatter it.

So the pattern to look for across all three: where do you appear, how specific did you have to get and did the tool name you from real recognition or just from remembering you?

Step 3: The name test, and is it even accurate?

Now search your own name. If you are a personal brand, use your name. If you also have a business brand, search that too. I am Crissy Conner, visibility strategist and found of The Visible CEO, and I want that connection to show up everywhere, so I check both.

Ask the AI tools directly in a new chat: “Who is [your name]?” then judge what comes back. Is it accurate? Is anything outdated? Is anything missing? Then do that again by adding: “what is [your brand name or company]?” review those questions above again.

When I first did this, I found a mess of inconsistencies. I have been a visibility coach, a visibility strategist, a visibility expert and a visibility mentor, also The Visibility Queen, and now I am The Visible CEO. All of those old labels were floating around, confusing the machine about who I am, right now, today. I also used to be an IT Recruiter and own a business called Live Love Dew. All of this was getting mixed up so I got to clean it all up.

Here is the reframe that matters: if what AI says about you is wrong, broad, or missing, that is not a dead end. That is your next assignment. It means the machine does not have enough information - make that clean and consistent information about you yet or at least not congruent enough in a place it can read. The fix is yours to make. When a tool gives you inaccurate information, ask where it got it, and it will usually share the source, an old association profile, an outdated directory, a stale bio. Now you know exactly what to update.

Step 4: The plain Google check, do you own page one?

Last search: just Google your name, and then your brand name. Do you take up the entire first page?

When I search Crissy Conner, the first six pages are all me. Some of are my own sites, some are podcasts I guested on, some are other people writing about me. On the fourth page there is an obituary for “Chrissy Connor” spelled differently, so not me, but everything else is. That kind of ownership is the goal for a personal brand.

Your brand name can be messier, and that is fine. Search “The Visible CEO” and you sometimes get Angie, the CEO of Visible, the cell phone company owned by Verizon. That is a disambiguation issue I live with. But when someone searches my personal name there is zero doubt about who I am, even though there are thousands of people out there with my exact name. As a personal brand this is what you want to see.

If your first page is full of other people, about other people, old profiles, or not much at all, that is the first thing to fix. And it all starts with your website. Your website has to be the home base with the most accurate information, and your About page is the single most important spot. Everything you find about yourself everywhere else should match what your About page says. Put a recurring note on your calendar, every quarter at minimum, to check that it is still accurate: your offers, what you do, and whether a stranger could tell from it whether to hire you.

The real lesson: own your lane, not the generic word

If you take one thing from this, let it be this. You do not win by ranking for the broadest possible label, because that space belongs to the biggest names and companies. You win by finding the specific lane where your buyer actually searches, confirming AI recommends you there, and then owning it relentlessly.

For me that lane is visibility across the feed, search and AI, for female coaches and service providers. That is narrow, it is true and it is a category I can own rather than rent. Your job is to find yours. And the reason this exercise is worth your time twice over is that it is a twofer: you are checking your visibility to AI and your visibility to Google in the same sitting, because the same clean, consistent story feeds both.

Do this test, then tell me what you found

Run the searches. Save the PDFs. Notice how deep you had to dig, whether the tools named you from real recognition or from memory and whether what they say about you is accurate. That is your baseline and you do not have to stay there.

If you would rather not sort through all of it alone, there are three ways I can help. Visible and In Demand gives you a taste of what being visible across the feed, search and AI looks like. The OMNI Method is my six month group coaching programing with step-by-step trainings and coaching calls, the best fit if you want group visibility coaching for women and you are ready to get to work. The Visible Inner Circle is the deeper, hands-on, personalized experience. “You can explore all of them and work with Crissy Conner on your Visibility Strategy when you are ready.

FAQs

How do I check if AI recommends me?

Search a generic version of what you do in Google’s AI Overview, then in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Always log out before you do or use an incognito window. If you are not named, go deeper, add your niche and who you serve and search again. Keep track of how deep you have to go. Ask each tool, who it would recommend for what you do, and check whether it named you from real recognition or just from remembering your past chats.

What do I do if AI has my information wrong?

Treat it as your to do list, not a dead end. Ask the tool where it got the information, and it will usually link the source. Update that source and make sure your website's About page is accurate first, since everything else found online about you should match your entity home there.

Does AI recommend my business if I am a personal brand?

Check both your personal name and your business brand name. Depending on how popular either is, one can be easier than the other. You want both to return an accurate, consistent story about who you are and what you do.