Your Competitor Is Being Recommended by AI Right Now. Here's How to Check in 20 Minutes.

You don't need a tool, a budget, or a consultant to answer the single most important question about your brand's visibility right now: when a buyer asks an AI about your category, does it recommend you, or your competitor?

You just need twenty minutes and a willingness to see the honest answer. Here's the exact audit we run in the first hour with a new client. Do it today.

Step 1: Write your buyer's five real questions (5 minutes)

Not the questions you wish they asked. The ones they actually ask. Think about the language a buyer uses before they know your brand exists, when they're describing a problem, not searching a product name. For example: "how do I prove marketing ROI to my CFO," "best agencies for AI search optimisation," "tools to measure content performance," "how to get my brand mentioned by ChatGPT," "alternatives to [the category leader]."

Write five. The more they sound like a frustrated human and less like a keyword, the more revealing the results.

Step 2: Ask all three engines (8 minutes)

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google (look for the AI Overview at the top). Paste each question into each engine. That's fifteen quick queries. For every answer, note two things: which brands get named, and whether yours is one of them.

Do it in a fresh session or logged out where you can, so your own history doesn't skew the results. You want to see what a stranger sees, not what the tool has learned you want.

Step 3: Score yourself honestly (2 minutes)

For each of your fifteen query-engine combinations, mark one of three outcomes: Named (you were explicitly recommended), Absent (you weren't mentioned but competitors were), or Nobody (the engine gave a generic answer naming no one). Tally them up.

If you're Named in most: excellent, protect that position, because it's a real moat. If you're mostly Absent: your competitors are being recommended to your buyers, by name, in the exact moment of consideration, and you're not in the room. If it's mostly Nobody: the category is wide open, and whoever moves first to become the answer will own it.

Step 4: Read the descriptions, not just the names (3 minutes)

Now go back and actually read how the engines describe the brands that got named, including you, if you made it. This is where the gold is. The AI's description reveals exactly what content it has absorbed. If a competitor is described as "known for transparent, measurable results," that phrase came from somewhere: content they published, conversations they shaped. If your own description is thin, vague, or wrong, that tells you precisely what the model is missing about you.

Step 5: Find the one pattern (2 minutes)

Look across all your notes for the single most common reason you lost. Usually it's one of three: the engines couldn't find clear content from you answering that question; a competitor had published something sharper and more specific; or the engine simply didn't have enough signal about you to include you confidently. That one dominant pattern is your highest-leverage fix.

What to do with what you found

Most brands who run this audit are genuinely startled. They discover they're invisible for questions they assumed they owned, or that a smaller competitor is being recommended everywhere because they quietly out-published on the exact topics buyers ask about. It's uncomfortable, and it's the most useful twenty minutes of marketing work you'll do this quarter, because for the first time you're seeing what your buyer sees.

The fix is rarely mysterious once you've seen the gap. It's clearer content on the questions that matter, structured so engines can read and cite it, and enough presence in the category conversation that the model trusts you as an answer. That's exactly the work we do, but you don't need us to run the audit. You need us for what comes after, once you've seen what's there.

Run it today. Then, if you don't like what you found, let's talk about changing it.