How to check whether AI assistants recommend and link to your website

Step 1. Prepare neutral customer questions

Use questions customers ask before buying: “which service suits…”, “what can I use to check…” or “where can I do…”. Do not include your brand name or website address in the question: this checks whether the website appears on its own instead of suggesting the answer. Save the exact text of every question so you can ask it consistently later.

Step 2. Ask questions in several AI assistants

Ask each question in a new, clean conversation without earlier messages, and enable web search if the service offers it. Answers depend on the service, model, time, language, region and account, so record the date, service, mode and model if displayed. A consistent question set matters for comparison, not a one-off check.

Step 3. Distinguish a mention from a link

A mention is your brand name in the answer text. A link, or citation, is your website address among the answer’s sources. Save the full text and every link, including links hidden behind source icons. If you could not reveal all sources, mark the check as incomplete: the absence of a link in the visible answer does not yet mean there is none.

Step 4. Check referrals in your own analytics

If the assistant provides a link and someone follows it, the referral source is visible in website analytics. OpenAI states that ChatGPT automatically adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links from search results. For other services, inspect the referring domain, such as perplexity.ai or gemini.google.com. Attribution can be lost, so some visits appear as direct traffic. A referral indicates a click, not the text of the person’s question.

Step 5. Review search engine data

Google states that, to appear as a link in AI Overviews and AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet; there are no separate technical requirements. Impressions in these features are included in Search Console’s overall Performance report. A separate Generative AI performance report is also available there. If it is not visible, the website usually has too few impressions in those features, rather than zero. Check the Search generative AI setting to make sure the website is not excluded. For Bing, review page status in the free Bing Webmaster Tools.

Step 6. Make sure AI search crawlers can access the pages

Check robots.txt and hosting or CDN rules for search crawlers: OpenAI connects ChatGPT search inclusion with OAI-SearchBot, Perplexity describes PerplexityBot, and Google Search uses Googlebot. A page should return 200, contain its main text directly in HTML, have no noindex and specify a canonical address. Allowing training crawlers is not required for this; it is a separate website owner decision.

What this check will not show

There are no public statistics for how many people ask AI a specific question. An answer given to one person does not guarantee the same answer for another. Submitting a page to a search engine does not mean indexing; indexing does not mean citation; and citation does not guarantee visits. Check each stage separately — publication, indexing, an answer link and a visit — and save dated evidence for each.

How this works in AURA

AURA stores a panel of neutral questions for your project. An MCP-connected agent asks them in AI services available to it and saves the full answer with sources, date and check mode. The AURA website tracker shows recognized AI referrals and entry pages. AURA does not guarantee inclusion in AI answers: it helps you check every stage using facts.

Sources

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