How to Check If You’re Being Cited in AI Overviews (Without Ahrefs or SEMrush)

Ask most SEO agencies whether they can get you cited in Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT or Perplexity, and the honest answer is: nobody can promise that. Ask the same agencies whether they’ll talk about it in a proposal, and increasingly the answer is yes — “AI visibility,” “GEO strategy” and “AI Overview optimisation” are showing up in pitches for businesses that have never once checked whether they’re being cited anywhere.

That’s the gap this guide is for. You don’t need Ahrefs, SEMrush or a paid AI-tracking tool to get a rough, honest picture of where you currently stand. It takes twenty minutes, a few searches, and a willingness to read the results properly rather than skimming for your brand name.

Why Check This Before You Sign Anything

If an agency’s proposal leans on AI visibility as a selling point, you want to know two things: where you stand today, and what “improvement” would actually look like. Without a baseline, any claim of progress is unverifiable — you’re simply taking the agency’s word for it, every month, indefinitely.

A baseline also tells you something about the agency itself. One of the clearer proposal red flags is a strategy section built entirely on assumption, with no evidence the agency looked at your actual starting point first. If they haven’t checked where you appear in AI answers before pitching you AI-visibility work, that’s worth noting.

The Free-Tool Checklist

None of this requires a subscription. It requires patience and a private/incognito browser window, so your search history and location don’t skew what you see.

1. Open an incognito window and search Google for the questions your customers actually ask — not your brand name, but the queries that should logically lead to you. A plumber might search “how much does a boiler service cost UK,” not “[Business Name] reviews.” Note whether an AI Overview appears at all, and if it does, whether your business, your content or your competitors are cited as sources.
2. Repeat the same searches with “AI Mode” or Search Labs’ AI features switched on, if available on your account, since results can differ from the standard AI Overview.
3. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the same customer-style questions directly. Perplexity is particularly useful here because it shows its sources inline — you can see exactly which sites it pulled the answer from, and whether yours is one of them.
4. Search your own brand name plus a qualifying question — “is [Business Name] any good,” “[Business Name] reviews,” “[Business Name] vs [competitor]” — to see what AI tools currently say about you when asked directly. This surfaces third-party content (review sites, directories, forums) shaping your AI presence, which is often more influential than your own website.
5. Check Google Search Console’s Performance report for a rough proxy. It won’t isolate AI Overview clicks specifically, but a widening gap between impressions and clicks on your top queries is a reasonable signal that AI-generated answers are increasingly satisfying searchers before they reach your site.
6. Run the same set of questions against two or three competitors and note who gets cited. This is the closest thing to competitive intelligence you’ll get without a paid tool, and it’s directly useful in judging whether an agency’s “AI visibility gap” claim is plausible.

What to Do With What You Find

You’re already appearing in some AI answers. Good — that’s your baseline. Any agency proposing AI-visibility work should be able to explain specifically how their activity would extend that, and should be willing to track the same queries going forward as a measurable outcome.

You’re not appearing anywhere, and neither are your competitors. This is common in lower-search-volume or highly local categories, where AI Overviews simply don’t trigger as often. It’s a reasonable sign that heavy AI-visibility spend isn’t the priority right now, whatever the pitch says.

Your competitors are appearing and you’re not. This is the scenario where AI-visibility work has a genuine, evidenced case — and it’s a much stronger basis for a proposal than a generic claim that “AI search is the future.”

The businesses getting the worst value from “GEO” spend aren’t the ones who tried it and it didn’t work — they’re the ones who paid for it without anyone checking whether there was a citation gap to close in the first place. Twenty minutes of searching tells you more than most agencies will volunteer.

Andy McLoughlin, Founder of Before You Invest

Reading an Agency’s AI Visibility Claims Against This

Once you’ve done this yourself, an agency’s proposal reads differently. If they cite an “AI visibility gap” for your business, you can ask them to show you exactly what they searched to find it. If they can’t reproduce it, that’s a fair question to press on. Our guide to GEO vs SEO goes further into separating provable AI-visibility work from the buzzword version, and our plain-English guide to GEO, AEO and AIO is a useful reference if the proposal is throwing acronyms at you without defining them.

None of this replaces a proper paid tracking tool if AI visibility genuinely matters to your business long-term. But as a way to sanity-check a proposal before you sign, it costs nothing but time — and it puts you in a much stronger position at the negotiating table.