AI Citation Checker — Does AI Cite Your Brand?

An AI citation checker asks an AI answer engine a prompt and reports whether your brand appears in the answer — either cited (your domain is in the sources) or mentioned (named in the text without a link). This one checks several engines at once — ChatGPT with web search, Google AI Overviews and Gemini — and shows the exact sources each used. It is a sampling tool: it tells you what an engine returned for that prompt at that moment, not a permanent verdict.

No, and it is important to be honest about that. This uses each vendor’s API — OpenAI’s Responses API with web search, Gemini with grounding — which are not the same pipelines as the consumer chatgpt.com or the Gemini app. Answers also vary by phrasing, location, personalisation and time. Treat every result as one representative sample, useful for spotting whether you appear at all and for watching a trend over repeated checks, not as the single truth of what every user sees.

“Cited” means your own domain appears in the answer’s list of sources — the engine pulled from your page and is pointing readers to it. “Mentioned” means your brand name appears in the answer text, but your domain is not among the linked sources — the engine knows of you but is citing someone else. Cited is the stronger position; mentioned is a foot in the door. The tool reports them separately because the fixes differ.

Google shows an AI Overview on only a portion of queries, and deliberately suppresses it on most Your-Money-or-Your-Life topics — health, finance, legal — and on many navigational and commercial queries. When there is no AI Overview for your prompt, there is nothing to be cited in, so the tool reports “no answer” and excludes that cell from the score rather than counting it as absence. If you never see an AI Overview for your queries, that is a fact about the query, not about you.

The other tools read free, public data — robots.txt, a page’s HTML, Wikidata — so they cost nothing to run and we let you run them without limit. This one calls paid AI APIs on every check, and a live Google scrape for AI Overviews, so each run costs real money. That is why it asks for your email up front and caps how many checks you can run in a day. It is still free to you; it is just not free to us.

No. AI answers are not deterministic. The same prompt can return different sources minutes apart, and a model update or a fresh crawl can change who gets cited. A single “cited” result is encouraging but not a guarantee, and a single “absent” result is not a sentence. The value is in the pattern: check the prompts that matter to you regularly and watch whether your presence is rising or falling.

Test the questions your customers actually ask — “best X for Y”, “how do I do Z”, “X alternatives”, “is X worth it” — in the exact words they would use, not your brand name. Searching your own brand name almost always surfaces you and tells you little. The useful check is whether you appear on the non-branded, problem-first questions where a buyer is choosing between options and has not heard of you yet.

Citation follows from being a genuinely useful, extractable source on the topic. In practice that means content that answers the question directly and is structured for extraction, a page AI crawlers are actually allowed to fetch, a brand the model can resolve as a distinct entity, and enough independent authority that the model trusts you on the subject. Those are the layers our other free tools check individually, and what the full AI Visibility Audit measures together. There is no shortcut that makes an engine cite a page that does not deserve it.

We send your email and the check’s summary to our own system so we can email you the report and follow up — that is the point of a free tool. The prompts you test are included so the report is useful. We do not sell this on. If you would rather not leave an email, the other tools on the site need none.