You will run a repeatable check of how often your business is cited or mentioned in AI answers for your priority questions.
Mei Ling asked ChatGPT once whether it knew any home bakers in Punggol, saw her name in the answer and felt relieved. A week later she asked again in slightly different words and her name was missing. She did not know which answer to believe, and neither one told her what to do next.
One question asked once tells you very little about AI visibility. This exercise sets up a check you can repeat: the same ten questions, asked in the same places, recorded the same way, every month. Over a few months, it shows you trends that a single answer cannot.
Start from your keyword map from lesson 2.5, Build your keyword map. Search keywords are short and clipped. Questions to an assistant are longer and more like speech. Turn your priority clusters into the questions a real customer would type or say.
Mix the kinds of question. Include some where the customer wants a business recommendation, such as "Which home bakers in Punggol make custom birthday cakes?" Include some where they want information your pages answer, such as "How far ahead should I order a custom cake in Singapore?" And include one or two that name you directly, such as "What do people say about Mei Ling's Bakes?", to see what assistants say about your business when asked.
Write each question exactly as you will ask it, and keep the wording fixed from month to month. Changing the words changes the answers, and then you cannot compare.
Run each question in Google, noting whether an AI Overview appears, and in at least two assistants with web search switched on. Lesson 8.2, How other AI assistants find and cite sources, explained why web search matters: without it, answers come from training data and carry no citations. Choose the assistants your customers are most likely to use. If you are unsure, ask a few customers.
Use the same setup each time. Sign out or use a fresh chat where possible, so earlier conversations do not shape the answer, ask from Singapore and write down the date.
Make a tracking sheet with a row for each question and a group of columns for each place you ask, Google and each assistant, and record three things in every group. First, whether your business is mentioned by name in the answer. Second, whether any of your pages is cited as a source, and which page. Third, which other sources are cited, so you can see who the assistant relies on.
Keep mentions and citations apart. A mention without a citation means the assistant knows your name, possibly from a directory or review site. A citation means one of your pages was retrieved and used. Both are useful, and they point to different fixes. A missing citation where competitors are cited usually means your page is not answering that question as clearly as theirs, which lesson 8.3, Write passages an assistant can quote, addresses. A missing mention when others are named may mean your business is not described consistently or prominently enough across the web, which modules 6 and 7 address.
Here is a part of Mei Ling's first check, with her own results as the example. For "Which home bakers in Punggol make custom birthday cakes?", Google showed an AI Overview that cited a food blog's list and two other bakers' sites. The first assistant mentioned her by name, though the source it cited was a directory page rather than her own site. The second named three other bakers and cited a forum thread.
For "How far ahead should I order a custom cake in Singapore?", no AI Overview appeared, and neither assistant mentioned or cited her, although her ordering page answered the question. That was before her rewrite in lesson 8.3, and the page had buried the answer in its fourth paragraph.
Across ten questions, she was mentioned in four answers out of thirty and cited in one. The three pages she marked to improve were her ordering page, her custom cakes page, which never said "Punggol" in its main text, and her flavours page, which had its menu as an image.
These counts are her own, from one month, and they will move from run to run. What she will watch is whether they rise over the next few months as she makes changes.
Answers change between runs and between users, as lesson 8.2 explained. So do not react to one month's result. Run the same ten questions on roughly the same day each month, add the results as new columns, and look at the direction over three to six months. Lesson 9.4, Build your monthly SEO review routine, includes this check in your monthly review.
This check measures what assistants say. Measuring how many visitors arrive on your site from AI assistants, and what they do there, is a job for analytics, covered in Marketing analytics: GA4, attribution and testing.
Write your ten questions now, set up the sheet, and run your first check, as the activity below describes.
Run the ten-question check, record citations and mentions in the tracking sheet, and note the three pages most worth improving.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).