Buyers now ask AI what to buy. Is your brand in the answer?
A growing number of buyers ask an AI assistant which tool to pick, and the assistant answers with three or four names. If your brand is one of them, you make the shortlist. If it is not, you may never know, because nobody clicked and nobody bounced. This post explains the problem, what decides who is named, and how Citeably, the tool we build, approaches it.
By the Citeably team · · · 6 min read
The shift: no page two
A few years ago a buyer typed a few words into Google and scanned ten links. Now many ask an assistant: what is the best tool for X for a small team? The answer is a short paragraph that names a few brands. There is no second page.
A brand that is not named is simply absent, and no report shows it.
The problem is that you cannot see it
Most teams do not know what these assistants say about them. Three things make it hard to see:
- Answers differ by assistant. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude often name different brands for the same question.
- Answers change from run to run. Ask the same question twice and the list can change, so one check is a snapshot, not a verdict.
- Your analytics cannot show it. Rank trackers measure links on a results page, not whether you were named inside a written answer.
What decides who gets named
Assistants build an answer from the pages and sources they can read, plus what they learned in training. In practice three things matter:
- Can they find you? Crawlable pages, a sitemap, text readable without JavaScript, and AI crawlers not blocked by accident.
- Can they tell what you are? A plain description of what you do, who it is for, and how you differ from the names that already appear.
- Are you mentioned elsewhere? Reviews, comparisons and community threads the assistants already lean on when they list options.
What nobody can promise
Fixing these does not guarantee you will be named. But a brand that fails all three is easy to leave out, and a brand that cannot see the answers cannot fix anything.
How Citeably approaches it
We built Citeably to see this without doing it by hand. It does four things.
- It asks the questions your buyers ask. You enter your site, it writes buyer-style questions about your category without your brand name, and asks them to assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
- It shows what was said, not just a score: the actual answers, which brands were named, how often you were, and the reasons the assistants gave for picking others. Those reasons are the claims a page has to make, truthfully, to be in the same answer.
- It turns that into a short fix list that starts with what it saw, such as a blocked crawler or an unclear homepage, with the first step spelled out. It can also generate files to paste into your site, such as an llms.txt, structured data and an FAQ. The free check includes the first fix.
- It lets you re-check, and only calls a change real when it is bigger than the normal run-to-run swing. It never claims your change caused it.
What is free and what is not
The check itself is free and needs no signup. Paid plans add weekly tracking and, for agencies, white-label client reports.
A real example
We used it on a real product, Testimoni, a testimonial tool. Asked eight buyer questions on each of three assistants, it was named in 2 of 24 answers (8%), both from Perplexity, for the more specific questions. We published the number, the plan and a progress log, and we will update it at each re-check. It is in this blog under Testimoni is named in 2 of 24 AI answers.
What Citeably does not do
We would rather say this plainly than oversell:
- It cannot promise you will be named. Nobody honestly can.
- It cannot tell you that a change caused a result. It can show what changed and what the numbers did.
- A single check is a small sample. Treat it as a starting point and look at the trend.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the same as SEO?
They share groundwork, such as crawlable, clear pages, but the goal and the measure differ. SEO is about ranking in a list of links; AI visibility is about being named inside an answer.
Do I need a paid plan to start?
No. The free check shows the answers, who was named and why, and the first fix, with no signup.
Who is Citeably for?
Small teams and agencies who want to know whether AI assistants name their brand or their clients, and what to fix first.