How to check if AI will quote your content, and find the gaps

You can check whether AI will quote your content without any tool. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude the questions your buyers ask, and in each answer look at three things: whether your product is named, which pages the answer quotes or cites, and whether what it says about you is true. Your gaps are the questions where a competitor is named instead, the sites AI cites that never mention you, and the facts it gets wrong. This guide shows how to do that by hand in an afternoon, and how to score how well AI understands your brand.

We build Citemark, a tool that runs these checks automatically, so read the last section with that in mind. Everything before it works with a notebook and three browser tabs.

What "AI will quote your content" means

AI assistants use your content in two different ways, and it helps to check them separately.

1. Cited sources. When an assistant searches the web before answering, it reads a handful of pages and often links them. If your page answers the buyer's question clearly, it can be one of those sources, and your product is far more likely to be named.
2. What the model already knows. Without a web search, the answer comes from what the model learned in training: your site, but also reviews, comparison articles and forum threads about you. There's no link to check here. What matters is whether the description is right.

"How well AI understands your brand" is the second part: does it put you in the right category, name the right audience, know your main features and price, and list sensible alternatives? A brand that AI understands well gets recommended for the right questions. One it misunderstands gets left out, or recommended for the wrong ones.

Step 1: Write the questions buyers ask

Pick 5 to 10 questions in two groups.

• Discovery questions, without your brand name: "best uptime monitoring tool for a small team", "Mailchimp alternatives", "form builder with payments and conditional logic". These show whether AI finds you on its own.
• Understanding questions, with your name: "What is Acme and who is it for?", "How much does Acme cost?", "What are the alternatives to Acme?". These show whether AI describes you correctly.

Use the words buyers use, not your marketing language. Our guide on choosing buyer questions goes deeper.

Step 2: Ask each assistant and record three things

Open a fresh chat in each assistant for every question, and ask each question twice. Answers vary from run to run, so one answer is a sample, not a verdict. Why answers vary explains how much.

Keep it in a simple table: one row per question and assistant. Ten questions on three assistants, asked twice, is 60 answers. That's about two hours by hand.

Step 3: Score how well AI understands your brand

For the understanding questions, give each assistant a score out of 10:

• Category is right (2 points)
• Audience is right (2 points)
• Top three features are named correctly (2 points)
• Price and free plan are right or reasonably close (2 points)
• No wrong claims: nothing invented, no old pricing, no features you dropped (2 points)

A score under 6 means AI doesn't know you well yet. The fix usually starts on your own site: a homepage that says plainly what you are and who it's for, a public pricing page, and a features page in plain words. Then update the review sites and directories that describe you, because AI reads those too.

Step 4: Find the gaps

Now turn the table into a to-do list. There are four kinds of gaps.

1. Question gaps. Buyer questions where competitors are named and you aren't. For each one, write a page on your site that answers that exact question, honestly, including how you compare. Comparison pages AI cites shows the format.
2. Source gaps. Sites AI cites that never mention you: list articles, review sites, forum threads, sometimes a competitor's blog. Ask to be added or reviewed where a page lists tools, and publish a better page of your own where it's a rival's post. Which websites AI cites covers where to start.
3. Fact gaps. Wrong price, missing features, an old plan name. Fix your own pages first, then the profiles AI quotes.
4. Access gaps. If your robots.txt blocks the bots that fetch pages for AI answers, nothing else matters. The AI crawler checker shows which of 15 AI bots your site allows.

What makes a page easy for AI to quote

The pages that get cited share a few habits:

• They answer in the first two sentences. The question is the heading; the answer comes right under it.
• They're specific. Prices, limits, numbers and who it's for, not adjectives.
• They compare fairly. Balanced comparisons that say when a rival is the better pick get quoted more than sales pages.
• They're readable without scripts. Text in the page, not inside images or behind a login.
• They're current. A date and up-to-date pricing make a page safer to quote.

Doing it with a tool

By hand works for a first look. It gets tedious when you want 50 questions on three assistants every week, and that's when a tool earns its price.

The free AI visibility check does Step 2 for 5 questions in about a minute, with no sign-up. It writes buyer questions from your homepage, asks ChatGPT and Claude, and shows whether you're named, who is named instead, which sites the answers cite, and three fixes. If you use Claude, you can run the same check inside a chat with the Citemark connector.

Citemark's paid plans keep asking the same questions so you can see whether your fixes work. Starter is $19 a month for 50 questions on ChatGPT and Gemini, with your top 10 checked every day and the rest weekly. Pro is $49 a month and adds Claude, with 100 questions and the top 15 checked daily. Both show the pages each answer cites, a Fixes tab, a fact check that flags answers with your price or features wrong, and alerts when you drop out of an answer or a rival enters one. Every account starts with a 7-day Pro trial with no card: start a 7-day Pro trial.