Ranking on Google no longer guarantees you exist in AI answers
A growing share of buyer research now happens inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers, where the engine answers the question itself and names two or three cited sources. Everyone else on the topic is invisible. The uncomfortable part is that AI citation is not a copy of the Google ranking: engines routinely cite pages that rank nowhere near the top, because they select for something different — pages that answer the question directly, back claims with linked sources, and carry concrete data an answer can be built from.
The trade-off cuts both ways. AI answers resolve many questions without a click, so raw search traffic shrinks — but visitors who arrive from an AI answer come pre-sold by a recommendation and convert unusually well. That makes “am I the cited source for my buyers' questions?” the new visibility question, and it is one most site owners have never actually measured. We wrote up the full strategy in Ranking is no longer enough: making content citable by ChatGPT and Google AI; this tool is the measurement half of that argument.
How the check works, step by step
You start with your domain and three to five topics your business wants to be known for. From those, the tool generates roughly ten buyer-intent questions — the phrasings a real prospect would type into an AI assistant when they are close to a decision, not generic informational queries. Every generated question is shown as an editable checkbox before anything runs, so you can drop the ones that miss and see exactly what will be asked. The free sample then runs three of those questions against the ChatGPT proxy, live, with no signup.
The full report, unlocked with your email, runs every question on two engines: Google Gemini and OpenAI's web-search API, which serves as a proxy for ChatGPT. For each question and engine, the tool reads the generated answer, extracts every cited domain, and records whether your site appears — and which sites do when it does not. On top of the raw results, the diagnosis fetches the cited competitor pages for your biggest gaps and compares them against your closest page: does theirs answer the question in the first paragraph, are their claims backed by linked sources at the point they are made, and how much concrete data do they bring that yours does not.
How to read the results honestly
Results are reported per engine, never blended, because AI citation is strongly platform-specific: a page Gemini cites constantly may never appear in a ChatGPT answer, and vice versa. A single “AI visibility score” averaged across engines would hide exactly the pattern you need to see. Second, the API checks are a proxy for the consumer products. The ChatGPT app adds personalization, memory, and conversation context that a cold API call does not have, so treat the results as measuring the engines' underlying source-selection behavior rather than reproducing any one user's screen.
Third, citations move. The same question asked with slightly different phrasing, or on a different day, can surface different sources. One check is a sample of your citation visibility — a good one for finding your largest, most consistent gaps — not a guarantee of what any user sees at any moment. No tool can predict or promise AI citations, and this one does not try. What it gives you is the honest baseline: where you are cited today, who is cited instead, and observable reasons why.
Acting on the gaps
A citation gap is a writing brief. The pages AI engines cite share a recognizable shape: a direct answer to the question in the opening, claims backed by linked sources right where they are made, and concrete data — numbers, named studies, first-hand results — instead of generic advice. A page that mentions your topic in passing will not compete with a page built for the question, which is why the diagnosis points at specific, fixable differences rather than telling you to “improve E-E-A-T.”
Writing that article is the part the tool hands off. Every gap in the full report carries a Write the article that earns this citation button that sends the question and the diagnosis into ProofWrite, which researches the topic and writes a fact-checked article with sources linked at the claims they support — the exact structure the cited pages have and yours is missing. And because citations fluctuate, the report can be imported straight into ProofWrite's weekly citation monitoring — this check becomes the first data point, so you can watch whether your citation share actually moves after you publish.
What this tool does and does not claim
AI engines do not publish how they choose sources, their behavior changes as models are updated, and their consumer apps differ from their APIs. Those are hard limits, and the tool is designed around them instead of past them: per-engine results because platforms differ, API-based checks labeled as the proxy they are, and every result framed as a sample rather than a standing. Nothing here predicts or guarantees a citation.
What the tool does claim is narrower and checkable: at the time of the check, these engines answered these questions citing these domains, and the cited pages differ from yours in these observable ways. That is enough to find real gaps, write against them, and — with repeated checks over time — see whether the work is moving your citation share. A measured baseline and an honest diagnosis beat a confident score that cannot be verified.
Pair it with the other free tools
AI citations are one half of the visibility picture; classic search is the other. The content gap finder mines your own Search Console data for the articles Google is already inviting you to write. Before writing an article for a citation gap, run the question through the information gain analyzer to see what the current top results already say and where you can add something genuinely new, and once the page is live, use the free SEO checker to confirm the on-page basics are in place.