You can see in about ten minutes whether Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name your business for a handful of buyer questions. You need a browser, a notepad, your site's robots.txt and access to Google Search Console. The result is a first reading. It is not a measurement, and the last section explains the difference.
Why the answer matters before the click
An AI answer shapes which businesses a searcher sees before they click any link. Pew Research Center studied the Google browsing data of 900 US adults in March 2025. When a Google AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result link in 8% of visits. Without a summary, they clicked in 15% of visits. Clicks on links inside the summary itself happened in 1% of visits to pages with one. These figures are about Google only. If the summary names a competitor and leaves you out, fewer searchers may reach your site.
The check, step by step
Work through these six steps in order. The time next to each step is our suggestion, not measured data.
1. Write 3 to 5 buyer questions (2 minutes). Use the words a customer would type before choosing a business like yours, for example "best accountant for freelancers in Leeds". Mix questions about your category and location with questions about a problem you solve. Write each one down exactly, because you will ask it again in step 4.
2. Ask each question in Perplexity (2 minutes). For every answer, note whether your business is named in the text, whether your domain is among the linked sources, and which other domains are linked. The list of other domains is often the most useful. In our study of 76 Perplexity answers to UK "best SEO agency in
3. Ask each question in Google (2 minutes). An AI Overview does not appear for every query. In Pew's March 2025 data, 12,593 of 68,879 Google searches produced an AI summary. Where one appears, record the same three things as in step 2. Expect several sources per Overview: in the same Pew data, 88% of summaries cited three or more sources.
4. Ask each question a second time (2 minutes). The same question can produce a different answer a few minutes later. In our study, 10 questions asked twice each on Perplexity (20 answers) gave lists of named businesses that overlapped by 0.72 on average. That figure is Jaccard similarity, a score where 1.0 means the two lists were identical. A single run can show you as named or missing by chance.
5. Check robots.txt for PerplexityBot (1 minute). Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure it does not block PerplexityBot. Perplexity documents this crawler as the one designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. Its user agent is:
Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; PerplexityBot/1.0; +https://perplexity.ai/perplexitybot)
A second agent, Perplexity-User, may visit a page when a user asks Perplexity a question. Perplexity says this fetcher generally ignores robots.txt rules, because a person started the request. So robots.txt mainly affects PerplexityBot.
6. Check that Google can show your page with a snippet (1 minute). Google states that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Confirm in Search Console that your key page is indexed. Then look in the page source for noindex, nosnippet, data-nosnippet or max-snippet. Google lists these as the controls that limit what it shows, so one left in place by mistake can keep a page out.
Where AI Overviews traffic shows up in Search Console
AI Overviews traffic is counted inside your normal Search Console numbers. Google says this traffic is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, in the Performance report under the "Web" search type.
In June 2026 Google announced separate generative AI performance reports in Search Console, covering AI Overviews and AI Mode. They are "rolling these reports out to a subset of websites", so your property may not have them yet. They show impressions, broken down by page and country, and by device and date. If you have the report, step 6 takes a minute longer: check which of your pages appeared.
What ten minutes can and cannot tell you
Ten minutes tells you whether you are named for a few questions today. It also shows which domains the engines cite in your category, and whether a robots.txt rule or snippet setting is blocking you. That is enough to spot an obvious technical problem or a directory you are missing from.
It cannot tell you how often you are named. With answers that change between runs, two runs per question give a rough signal at best. It cannot tell you whether your visibility is rising or falling, because you have one date. It cannot cover the range of questions real buyers ask. Counts also depend on method: our study counted only the links visible in the answer text, not each answer's full source list.
For a result you can compare over time, ask the same fixed questions on both engines several times per run. Our measurement method uses 3 runs per prompt per engine.
If you want this done for your business, our free GEO audit runs 10 buyer questions on Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, 3 times each, for 60 answers.