How to find out whether AI mentions you at all

The first question in every workshop is some version of: how do I know if this is working? It is the right question, and the honest answer is that the measurement layer for AI visibility is roughly where web analytics was in 1998. Immature, inconsistent, and full of vendors selling certainty they do not have.

That is not a reason to fly blind. It is a reason to measure manually, carefully, and on a schedule, which is more work and considerably more reliable than a dashboard with an invented score on it.

The hour-long audit

1. Write twenty prompts a real client would use. Not keywords. Full questions, with situations in them, of the kind you get asked on the phone. Ten about your specialty, five about your geography, five about problems you solve.
2. Run all twenty across three or four different assistants. They draw on different sources and disagree constantly, and the disagreement is informative.
3. Use a logged-out or private session. Otherwise you are measuring your own history, which will happily show you yourself and tell you nothing.
4. Record three things per prompt: were you mentioned, who was mentioned instead, and what sources were cited.
5. Ask one follow-up on the prompts where you did not appear: "who else works in this area?" Sometimes you are on the bench rather than off the field, which is a different and more fixable problem.
6. Save the whole thing with the date. The absolute numbers matter far less than the direction over three quarters.

The competitor names that come back are the most valuable output of this exercise, and nobody looks at them closely enough.

Read the citations, not the answer

When an answer names someone, look at where the information came from. In real estate it is rarely their own website. It is usually a brokerage profile, a portal, a local news mention, a podcast page, or a directory listing with real detail in it.

That list is your actual to-do list. It tells you which third-party surfaces carry weight in your market, and those are the places worth making accurate and detailed. Most agents discover their brokerage bio, which they have not read in four years, is doing more work than the site they paid for.

The three failure patterns

• Invisible everywhere. Usually a thin bio, no situation-specific content, and inconsistent details across platforms. Start with the wording, everywhere, before anything else.
• Mentioned but described wrong. Old brokerage, wrong market, a specialty you left behind. This is a consistency problem across your profiles and it is the fastest of the three to fix.
• Mentioned only for your name. You come up when someone types your name and never when they describe a problem. This means you have identity but no demonstrated expertise, and it is what situation pages exist to solve.

The lagging indicator that matters

Ask every new client how they found you, and record the answer verbatim rather than in a dropdown. "I asked ChatGPT who handles estate sales here and your name came up twice" is a data point no analytics platform will ever hand you, and it is the only one that connects to revenue.

Run the audit quarterly. Twenty prompts, same twenty, same day of the quarter. In a year you will have something almost nobody in your market has: an actual record of whether the machines know who you are.