Buyers are skipping Google and asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini instead. If your brand doesn’t show up in those answers, you’re losing consideration before anyone visits your site.
The fix starts with knowing where you actually stand.
Why AI Search Is a Different Problem Than SEO
Traditional SEO gets you ranked in a list of links. AI search folds your brand into a generated answer — or leaves you out entirely. The criteria aren’t the same. A competitor can rank lower than you on Google and still dominate the AI-generated response about “best project management tools for remote teams.”
That gap between your Google presence and your AI presence is what you need to measure first.
Run a Quick AI Visibility Audit
HubSpot’s free AI Search Grader (no account required) is currently one of the more practical tools for this. You enter your company name, location, and a specific description of your product or service — and specificity matters here. “Accounting software” is too vague. “Payroll software for freelancers” gives the tool something real to work with.
Within seconds it cross-references how you appear across the major AI platforms and returns a scored report across five dimensions:
- Brand recognition — Do these AI systems know your company exists, and how confidently do they surface it?
- Market positioning — Where do you sit relative to named competitors in AI-generated comparisons?
- Presence quality — Can AI accurately describe what you do, who you serve, and what makes you different?
- Brand sentiment — What tone does AI use when it mentions you? Neutral, positive, or subtly negative?
- Share of voice — How often do you appear versus competitors when someone asks a relevant category question?
The free version of the report gives you top-line scores. Entering your email unlocks a fuller breakdown that includes which competitors are outranking you, what narrative themes AI associates with your brand, and specific gaps to address.
What Low Scores Actually Tell You
A low brand recognition score usually means your company isn’t well-represented in the sources AI models pull from — think industry publications, authoritative directories, and third-party reviews. The models aren’t indexing your website directly the way Google does; they’re drawing on a broader corpus of web content that mentions you.
A low presence quality score is often a sign that your public-facing content is vague or inconsistent. If your own website, press coverage, and partner pages all describe your product differently, AI will struggle to form a coherent picture of you — and tend to skip you in favor of a competitor it understands clearly.
A sentiment problem is the most urgent finding. If AI consistently associates your brand with a complaint, a controversy, or an inaccuracy, that framing is baked into every answer it generates about you until the underlying sources change.
How to Actually Move the Numbers
Once you know your gaps, the fixes are concrete — though not instant.
For recognition and share of voice: Get your brand mentioned in more authoritative third-party content. Guest articles in trade publications, inclusion in comparison roundups, analyst mentions, and industry directory listings all expand the footprint AI models draw from. A mention on a niche but respected site often carries more weight than another page on your own domain.
For presence quality: Audit every major external description of your company. Your Crunchbase profile, G2 or Capterra listing, LinkedIn About section, and Wikipedia entry (if one exists) should all tell the same clear story about what you do and who you serve. Inconsistency is the enemy.
For sentiment: If the negative signal is coming from a cluster of critical reviews or a press story, address the root cause and then build a countervailing body of positive, factual content. AI models respond to weight of evidence over time.
Make It an Ongoing Check, Not a One-Time Fix
AI search is not static. Models update, new competitors enter the conversation, and your own content footprint changes. Running this audit once is useful; checking it quarterly is what actually protects your pipeline.
If you want automated tracking, HubSpot’s AEO monitoring tool can watch your AI visibility over time and flag when competitors start eating into your share of voice — so you’re not caught off guard.
Your Google rankings and your AI presence will increasingly diverge. The brands that audit both and treat them as separate problems will have a significant edge over those optimizing only for the algorithm they already know.