AI Visibility

How to see which sources AI cites for your business

By Adev Aarons · August 1, 2026

Most business owners are asking the wrong question about AI. They want to know how to make ChatGPT like them. The question that actually decides whether you show up is different, and once you see it, the fix gets a lot clearer.

AI doesn’t recommend businesses. It recommends sources.

When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “best [whatever] in [my city],” the AI doesn’t know the answer and doesn’t pick a favorite. It reads a handful of pages it trusts for that question, usually directories, “best of” lists, and a few review sites, and repeats the names it finds there.

So the real question is not “does AI like my business.” It’s “is my name in the pages AI reads?”

If it isn’t, the AI can’t say your name. It doesn’t matter how good you are. It names whoever is on those pages instead, which is usually a competitor who got listed and you didn’t.

The two-minute way to check

You don’t have to guess which pages those are. You can see them.

Run the AI Citation Finder. You type in one question your customers would actually ask AI, plus your website. It asks Perplexity and Claude that question live, pulls the exact sources they cite in the answer, and tells you whether your site appears in any of them.

The result is usually humbling and useful at the same time: a ranked list of the pages AI trusts for your niche, and a plain count of how many of them mention you. Most of the time the count is zero. That’s the point. Now you have the specific list to work on instead of a vague sense that “we should do more SEO.”

Reading your results

A few things to look for once you have the list:

The sources cited by more than one engine. If both Perplexity and Claude pull from the same page, that page is load-bearing for your category. Those are your first targets.

The type of each source. A curated directory is a different job than a Reddit thread or a local blog listicle. Getting into a directory is often a straightforward listing or application. Getting mentioned in an editorial roundup takes an actual pitch. Knowing the type tells you the effort.

Where you already appear, if anywhere. Sometimes you’re on one of the six and just buried. That’s a faster win than starting from nothing.

What to do with the list

Getting cited in those sources is the work. Not with spam or fake reviews, which the platforms and the AI both catch, but the legitimate version:

• Claim and complete your profiles on the directories that show up. Half-finished listings get skipped.
• Get named in the roundups and local guides that rank. That usually means reaching out with a real reason to be included, not a mass email.
• Make your own site easy for AI to read and quote, so when a source does mention you, the AI can connect the dots back to you.

None of this is a trick. It’s the same principle as word of mouth, just aimed at the pages AI happens to read.

We test this on ourselves

Fair question to ask an agency that says this: does it work on you? When we first ran the check on our own name, AI thought Specularis was a Roman mineral, not our company. So we’re fixing that in public and posting the scoreboard as we go. We’d rather show the climb than pretend we started at the top.

The bigger picture

The citation gap is one piece of a larger thing called AI visibility, or GEO/AEO. Being cited is one of five factors that decide whether AI can find and recommend you. The others are whether AI crawlers can even read your site, whether your business has a clear identity AI can point to, whether your content is quotable, and the technical basics underneath.

If you want the full picture rather than one question, run the free AI visibility audit. It scores your site 0 to 100 across all five and hands you the fixes.

But start with the citation finder. It takes thirty seconds, and it turns “I should probably do something about AI” into a specific list you can actually work through.