Checking your AI visibility
· 3 min read · MAALI team
More people now ask an AI assistant what to buy or who to hire. MAALI's AI visibility check shows whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude mention your business when they answer, which competitors they name instead, and what you can do about it. You'll find it under Marketing → AI visibility. It needs your MAALI Brain first.
1. Choose your questions
Type the questions yourself (free), or click Suggest questions from my MAALI Brain. That uses 1 credit, takes about 20 seconds and gives you up to 10 questions; if none come back, you aren't charged. MAALI writes the questions your customers ask before they know you, such as "best linen dresses for hot summers" or "alternatives to [a competitor]". They never include your name, because people who already know you don't need an assistant to find you.
Delete anything that doesn't fit and add your own, up to 15. Good questions are:
- specific: "accounting software for UK freelancers" beats "accounting software";
- close to a decision: "best…", "which… should I choose", "… vs …", "alternatives to …";
- local, if you serve a local area: "physio in Larkfield for running injuries".
2. Run the check
Click Run AI visibility check. It uses 1 credit per question; each question is asked in every assistant. MAALI asks each one through its official API, with web search on, the way a person would ask it: just the question, nothing about you. Most checks finish in 2 to 4 minutes, and you can leave the page. When many checks run at once, yours may wait in line for a moment first.
Questions that get no answers at all aren't charged. If an assistant is busy or unavailable, its missing answers are marked and left out of your score.
3. Read the results
- Visibility score: the share of answers that name you. The bars show each assistant separately.
- You vs competitors: how often the competitors in your MAALI Brain were named, next to you.
- Question by question: ✓ means you were named, and #2 means you were second in that answer's list of recommendations. ↗ means the answer cited your website. Open a question to read every answer and its sources.
- Websites the AI assistants rely on: the sites quoted most across the answers. These are the directories, review sites and articles worth being on.
- Earlier checks: your score over time.
Answers vary with the person, the place and the day, so don't read too much into one result. Look at the trend over a few checks.
4. Follow the plan
What to do next is a short plan built from the answers. It names the questions you're missing, what the assistants said about the businesses they chose, and the sites they cited. Typical steps:
- Write a page for a question you're missing. Click Turn into an article idea and it appears under SEO → Article ideas, ready for the Writer.
- Get listed on the directories and "best of" lists the assistants cite, with up-to-date details.
- Earn genuine reviews where the assistants look. Never buy or fake them.
- Make things clear on your site that the assistants praise in competitors: prices, delivery and returns, locations, what's included.
Can AI assistants read your website? runs free with every check:
- robots.txt: if it blocks crawlers like
OAI-SearchBot,PerplexityBotorClaude-SearchBot, those assistants can't read your pages to recommend you. Blocking training crawlers likeGPTBotis fine; it doesn't affect answers. The free robots.txt generator helps. - Structured data: schema.org markup (Organization or LocalBusiness) helps assistants get your name, address and offer right. Use the free schema markup generator.
- llms.txt: an optional short map of your site for AI tools. Few assistants use it yet. Try the free llms.txt generator.
5. Check again
Run the check again after you've published new pages or got new listings, usually after a few weeks. Your report email shows your latest AI visibility score next to your SEO score.
No one can guarantee what an AI assistant says. MAALI shows you where you stand and what's most likely to help, using the same questions each time so you can see what changed.
Further reading: why AI assistants recommend your competitors, getting listed where AI assistants look and robots.txt and AI crawlers.
Keep reading
How MAALI writes new page titles and meta descriptions for your site, and how to apply them in one click on WordPress, Ghost and Webflow, or paste them in.
How MAALI finds Reddit, forum, Hacker News and Stack Exchange threads from people who need what you sell, drafts a reply, and how to post it without spamming.
Give MAALI read-only access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4, so you can see what's working and get article ideas from real searches.
Connect your blog once, then send any MAALI article to it as a draft or live. Step by step for WordPress, Ghost, Webflow and GitHub-based sites.