How to track whether AI recommends your business

To track whether AI recommends your business, you check the AI engines the way your customers would — asking the real questions they'd ask — and record whether you're mentioned, for which questions, and on which engines. Do it regularly, because the answers change week to week.

Why you need to measure this

Most businesses have no idea whether ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews name them. They optimize blind. But AI answers are now a major way customers choose who to call, and if you can't see whether you're in those answers, you can't tell whether your marketing is working.

The manual method

List your customers' real questions. Not "plumber Austin" but "who can fix a burst pipe tonight in South Austin" — the way people actually ask AI.
Ask each engine. Run those questions through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google (for AI Overviews).
Record the result. For each question and engine, note: were you named? Were competitors named instead? What source was cited?
Repeat on a schedule. Weekly or monthly, so you can see trends, not snapshots.

Why it's harder than it sounds

Answers vary by phrasing, location, and over time, so one check tells you little.
Doing this by hand across four engines and a dozen questions is tedious and easy to abandon.
It's hard to tell whether a change you made actually moved anything without consistent records.

What good tracking looks like

You want a record over time of: which questions you appear for, your mention rate per engine, who shows up when you don't, and whether it's trending up after your fixes. That turns "I think our AI visibility is improving" into something you can actually see.

How TheNearHub does this

This is the core of what TheNearHub does: it tracks whether your business is cited across the major AI engines and Google, for the questions that matter to you, and shows the trend over time — so you can tell what's working instead of guessing. You can start with a free trial and see your current visibility baseline.