We Started Tracking What AI Says About Businesses. Here Is What It Said About Ours.

Yesterday we tested and Google's AI recommended our agency by name.

This wasn't just in a report, and not simply a projection. This was in a logged-out incognito session in Google's AI Mode, starting from a plain search for SEO services in a major metro, following up about AI visibility, and then asking the question every buyer eventually asks: which company is best for a startup?

It picked us, over an agency that has been in business much longer with more reviews than us.

That is the good half of the story. The other half is that in the same set of answers, the AI confidently referenced a domain name for our parent company that did not exist. Nobody had ever even registered it; the AI simply decided that a company with our name ought to live at that address and stated it as fact. That said, we registered the domain the next morning and pointed it at the real site, because the alternative was letting an AI hand our traffic to a URL that anybody could have claimed.

Both halves happened in the same conversation. That is what AI answers are like right now: capable of sending you a customer, and capable of inventing facts about you, in the same breath. Today we are opening up the thing that let us see both: AI Visibility Tracking, the measurement service we have been running on ourselves.

The question nobody is checking

Your customers are asking AI assistants for recommendations. Maybe not all of them, and probably not for everything, but the shift is measurable and it isn't changing soon. Someone in your market is typing "who is the best [what you do] near me" into ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode this week. Will you be recommended? The interesting part is that the assistant doesn't show them ten links, but rather names one or two businesses, describes them, sometimes quotes their prices, and moves on. If you're in that answer, you just received a powerful introduction in marketing. If you're not, a competitor did.

That is the strange part. We measure everything else. Rankings, traffic, conversion rates, review scores. But the question "what does the AI actually say when someone asks about my market" goes unasked and unanswered, because until recently there was no practical way to ask it on a schedule and keep the receipts.

This is why we built the schedule and log the answers, starting with our own agency.

What tracking our own agency taught us

We ran recurring queries about our own market against all the major assistants and recorded what came back. Three things stood out:

The answers cite specific pages, and you can see which ones are working. When Google's AI described us, it was not summarizing from air, but rather cited our services pages and FAQ content, our team's LinkedIn profiles, our product sites, and even our public GitHub repositories (this was an interesting finding). Every one of those citations is a signal about which parts of your web presence the machines actually read and trust. We only learned that our FAQ pages are earning citations because we looked.

The answers get facts wrong, and the errors are specific. The invented domain was the dramatic one, but it wasn't alone. A third-party listing the AI leaned on quoted an annual price for one of our products that doesn't match any plan we sell. Imagine what that means for a buyer: the AI told them a price, the price was wrong, and we would never have known why our prospect arrived with the wrong number in mind. These are issues: Wrong prices, dead links, stale addresses, services you do not offer, and the assistants repeat whatever the web says about you, including the parts that are wrong, all while saying it with complete confidence.

The answers move. Models retrain. Sources get recrawled. An answer that names you in March can drop you in June with nothing on your site having changed. A single check tells you where you stood on one day, but only repeated measurements on a regular schedule can honestly tell you whether you are gaining or losing ground, as well as why.

What the service actually does

AI Visibility Tracking is the loop we ran on ourselves, run for you.

We build query sets from the questions your customers actually ask, then run it against ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI on a set schedule, and every response is captured and archived. For each run we record whether you are named, how you're described, which of your pages actually get cited, which competitors get recommended when you don't, as well as what the models get wrong about you. When we catch a hallucination/inaccuracy, we trace back where the bad data probably came from and correct it at the source. When an update on your own site hides content from the AI crawlers, which actually happens far more often than you may realize, a real-browser re-scan catches the regression before the assistants relearn the wrong thing.

All of it rolls up into a monthly AI Visibility Score, so your standing across the assistants is one number with a trend line, backed by the recorded answers behind it. You watch it the way you already watch search rankings. One thing the service deliberately does not include: promises. Nobody controls what a model says, and anyone who guarantees you a ChatGPT recommendation is selling something they cannot deliver. We sell measurement, and the engineering that follows from it.

Why we think measurement comes first

There is a growing ecosystem of AI search optimization advice, and we sell some of it ourselves. Our AI search optimization service handles the 'fix' side (entity and schema work, answer-shaped content, crawler readiness, etc.). We built it on our own published research, including a crawl of 1,261 business websites that found 89 percent of sites name no human being a machine can read. If you never record what the assistants said before the work and what they said after, you cannot tell the difference between an optimization that worked and a model update that did not go your way. Measuring first means every dollar you later spend on fixes has a baseline to be judged against. Some of our tracking clients will never buy anything else from us, and the service is built exactly for that purpose.

Where to start

Two ways in, depending on how curious you are.

The fast one: run your site through our free audit. It shows what the AI crawlers can and cannot read on your site today, in about 60 seconds, no signup.

The complete one: book a free 15-minute call and we will run your business through the assistants live, on the call. You will hear what they say about you, what they say about your competitors, and what they get wrong.

We went looking for what the machines were saying about us and found a recommendation we did not know we had earned and a fabrication we did not know we needed to fix. Both were sitting there, findable, the whole time. Whatever the assistants are saying about your business right now, it is on the record somewhere. The only question is whether you are the one keeping the record.