Full Answer

Start with your twenty highest-intent queries — the questions a buyer asks before purchasing. Run each through ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity, and record every brand, URL, and content type that appears in the generated answer. This is manual and deliberate: no automated tool currently replicates what AI engines actually cite, because the answer changes with phrasing, context, and session history.

Next, examine the structural layer. Use Google’s Rich Results Test on competitor pages that earn citations and compare their schema markup against yours. AI engines favour pages with complete product schema, FAQ blocks, and clearly attributed statistics — the same signals that make content quotable in a generated answer. A competitor with richer structured data will consistently appear in AI answers even if they rank lower in traditional search. Ahrefs data confirms this: 62% of AI Overview citations come from outside the top 10 organic results (Ahrefs, 2026), so auditing AI visibility requires looking well beyond page-one rankings.

Track changes monthly. AI citation rankings are volatile — a single content update or schema addition can shift which brand an AI engine cites. Build a simple spreadsheet: query, platform, cited brand, cited URL, date. Over three months, patterns emerge that show which competitors are investing in AI visibility and which gaps you can fill.