When your buyers ask AI for a recommendation, does your name come up?
94% of business buyers now use AI while they buy, and generative search is where they start. The answer they get names a handful of companies. We find out whether yours is one of them, and send you the raw answers.
Free. We run it by hand. The report is yours whether or not you hire us.
Every check asks all four · not affiliated with any of them
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity
Where do B2B buyers look for a vendor now?
They ask an AI assistant first. Forrester surveyed about 18,000 business buyers and found that 94% use AI somewhere in their buying process, and that generative search now outranks vendor websites, sales reps and product experts as a source — combined.
"genAI searches are the starting point for B2B buyers"
- 94%of business buyers use AI somewhere in their buying process
- 55%compare vendors inside AI tools, before contacting anyone
Forrester, The State of Business Buying, 2026. ~18,000 global business buyers surveyed. January 2026.
That answer names a handful of companies. Whoever is in it is on the shortlist. Whoever isn't was never in the room.
If the AI answers the question, does anyone still click?
Mostly no. Pew Research Center metered what 900 US adults actually did across 68,879 Google searches. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a result 8% of the time instead of 15% — and clicked the link inside the summary in just 1% of visits.
| Clicked a result when an AI summary was shown | 8% |
|---|---|
| Clicked a result when no AI summary was shown | 15% |
| Clicked a link inside the AI summary itself | 1% |
| Ended the session there, with an AI summary | 26% |
Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears. browsing data from 900 US adults, 68,879 Google searches, March 2025. July 2025.
So the thing you lose isn't the visit. It's the recommendation.
One percent means the reader takes the names and goes. No referrer, no session, no line in your analytics. A traffic report cannot show you a deal that never became a visit — which is why being mentioned is the thing worth counting.
Why doesn't the model mention my company?
Because it never saw you. LLMs don't rank your website — they repeat what other sources say about you. Your site is one input; the rest are directories, review sites, Reddit threads, comparison posts and your competitors' pages.
One study put numbers on it. It tracked how often a brand is named depending on whether the model encountered its sources at all:
| What the model saw | GPT | Gemini |
|---|---|---|
| Model sees no source of yours | 2.8% | 3.8% |
| Model sees your own site cited | 49.0% | 58.4% |
| Model sees your site and the surrounding sources | 91.4% | 100% |
Tannenbaum, arXiv:2609.23162, From Prompt to Recommendation: A Fitted Stage Model of Brand Visibility in AI Search. 34,960 prompt-engine observations across GPT and Gemini, June–September 2026. September 2026.A preprint, not peer reviewed, by a single author at a company that sells AI-visibility services. We link it so you can weigh that yourself.
The authors also state their own limit, and we'll repeat it rather than stretch their numbers: "brand mention is not equivalent to a positive recommendation, rank, click, lead, or purchase". Being named is the start of the conversation, not the deal.
Which means the fix is mostly off your own site — and it is the reason a company can rank first on Google and never appear in the answer.
Does publishing an llms.txt get you cited?
No — not in Google Search, and Google says so itself. If somebody sold you that file as the fix, this is the sentence to read.
"Doing so will neither harm nor help your site's visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them."
One caveat we'll make for you, since it cuts against us: Google is talking about Google Search. It says nothing about ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, and neither will we.
We audited 7 mid-market sites. All 7 had the file. None were being cited by the models we checked. Seven sites is too small to call a trend. It is enough to say the file did not save them.
What is a Mention Rate?
Your Mention Rate is the share of your buyers' real questions where an AI assistant names your company. We measure it by asking the same questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and counting the answers you appear in. It counts mentions, not traffic.
It is the one number a traffic report cannot give you, and the only one that tracks whether you are in the shortlist your buyers are actually handed.
How we raise it
- 01
Find the questions your buyers actually ask
Built from your category, your competitors' positioning and the wording in your own sales calls. You approve the list before we run it.
- 02
Find the sources those answers cite — usually not your site
Every answer arrives with the domains behind it, ranked by how often each one carries the answer for your category.
- 03
Get you into those sources, and fix what they say about you
Directory profiles, review-site pages, comparison articles. Where a source has you wrong, we file the correction. Every listing arrives linked, so you can open it.
- 04
Re-measure every week. You see the same report we see.
Same questions, same models, fresh run. What moved and what didn't, with the dates attached.
Step 3 is not our theory. Across nine tested methods, citing credible sources was the most effective, lifting visibility by up to 40% — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, ACM SIGKDD (KDD) 2024. None of the 7 sites we audited were doing it.
Every number on this page
is one you can open yourself.
Every figure above links to the study it came from, with its sample size and date. Where a source is unreviewed or sells into this market, we say so next to the number.
What we don't do
- Guarantee rankings
- Case studies you can't verify
- Long contracts
- Report traffic instead of mentions
What you get every time
- The exact prompt behind every answer
- The model ID and the date it was recorded
- The raw response, verbatim
- Which sources got cited instead of you
We'll measure yours. Free.
Tell us the domain and what you're worried about. We run each check by hand, so it takes a few working days. Then twenty minutes to walk you through what we found. You keep the report whether or not we ever work together.
Questions we get
- Is this just SEO with a new name?
- No. SEO moves your own pages up a list of links. This is about whether other sources — the ones the models read — say your name at all. A company can rank first on Google and never appear in the answer, because the two systems look at different things.
- Can I check this myself?
- Yes, and you should. Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity and ask the question a buyer would ask about your category. See who gets named. That is the same thing we do, at more volume and with the results written down.
- How long does it take to change?
- We don't know for your category, and anyone who gives you a number hasn't measured yours. What we can tell you is what moved and what didn't, week over week, with the dates attached, so you can decide whether it's working.
You can find out what AI says about your company this week.
We'll run it and send you the transcript.