You can get a defensible baseline in half an hour with a spreadsheet and four browser tabs. It won't be as rigorous as a repeated panel, but it will tell you whether you have a problem, how big it is, and who's winning instead of you. Here's exactly how we'd run it if we were doing it by hand.
One thing to fix before you start: what you're measuring is citation rate — the share of your category's buying queries where an assistant names you. If you want the definition and what counts as a good score, that's covered separately. This piece is the runbook.
Minutes 0–10: write the query set
Write fifteen questions a real buyer would type, in their words, not yours. Pull them from sales calls, your support inbox, and the search terms already in your analytics. Cover four shapes:
- Category — *best X for Y*, *top X companies for Z*
- Cost — *how much does X cost*, *X pricing*
- Comparison — *X vs Y*, *alternatives to X*
- Problem-first — the symptom your buyer has before they know your category exists
Two rules. Don't include your brand name — *what is [your company]* measures recognition, not acquisition, and it will flatter you into thinking you're visible. And use the words buyers use: if your team says *generative engine optimization* and buyers say *getting found on ChatGPT*, test the second.
Minutes 10–25: run the panel
Open four tabs: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google (with AI Overviews), and Claude. Run each question in each, and for each one record five columns:
| Column | What to record |
|---|---|
| Query | The question, verbatim |
| Engine | Which assistant |
| Named? | Were you mentioned at all |
| Cited? | Was your site linked as a source |
| Who else | Every competitor named, in order |
Use a logged-out or temporary session. This is the mistake that ruins most DIY audits: your own account has months of history and memory about your company, so it will name you in ways a stranger's session never would. A fresh incognito window is the difference between measuring your visibility and measuring your own footprint in your own account.
Also record who else rigorously. The competitor column is the most actionable data in the whole exercise, and it's the one people skip.
Minutes 25–30: score it
Three numbers:
- Citation rate — appearances ÷ total query-engine combinations. Fifteen questions across four engines is sixty cells; named in twelve is 20%.
- Competitive share — of the cells where *anyone* in your category was named, what fraction was you. This is the more useful number early, because it separates *the engines don't answer this* from *the engines answer it with someone else*.
- Engine spread — your rate per assistant. A brand strong in one and invisible in another usually has an entity or third-party footprint problem rather than a content problem.
For calibration: an unoptimized brand typically lands 0–10% on category queries. A deliberate program reaching 30–40% is winning its category.
The three mistakes that make this useless
Using your own logged-in account. Covered above, and it's the big one — it can turn a 5% into an apparent 40%.
Running it once. Answers are stochastic; the same question asked twice can name different companies. A single run is an anecdote. Re-run the panel monthly and track the trend — that's the actual signal, and it's why the query set has to be *fixed* rather than rewritten each time.
Testing queries you already win. It's a natural instinct and it wastes the exercise. Deliberately include the questions you expect to lose, because those are the ones with pipeline attached.
What to do with the result
If you're under 10% on category queries, you're in the normal starting position for a company that hasn't done this work — not in trouble, just invisible. The next question is *which* gap, and why your competitors show up and you don't walks the five causes and how to tell them apart.
If you'd rather not build the harness by hand — or you want the panel run repeatedly rather than once — our free citation audit does exactly this across the major assistants and sends back the scored result, including who's being named instead of you. That report is also how Ascent gets scoped, and the number it produces is what the program is held to afterwards.
