Do you need an AI visibility platform?
You need an AI visibility platform if buyers ask AI tools the kind of question your business answers and you can’t say, with evidence, whether those answers include you. If your customers never choose a supplier that way, you can wait, and it’s worth checking again in six months.
An AI visibility platform shows what AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude say when someone asks about the work you do. It records whether they name you and who they name instead. Ghostart then builds a plan from those results and helps you create content to plug the gaps.
Four questions will tell you whether that’s worth paying for.
Do your buyers ask AI before they choose?
Start with your own customers. Ask the next five people who enquire how they found you and what they looked at before they got in touch. If any of them mention an AI tool, you’ve got your answer.
Then write down five questions a buyer would ask before picking a business like yours, in the words they’d use. As an example, “who should I use for payroll for a 20-person company” is a buyer’s question. Your company name followed by “reviews” doesn’t count, because whoever types that already knows you exist.
Can you check by hand?
You can, once. Put your five questions into each AI tool, note which businesses each answer names and save what you find. It’ll take about an hour, and you’ll know more than you did.
The trouble starts when you rely on it. Researchers at the University of St. Gallen found that only 34–42% of the sources AI tools cited were the same from one day to the next. Kevin Indig, writing in Growth Memo in May 2026, found that only 2.37% of cited URLs appeared across all three engines he compared for the same prompt.
So what you saw on Tuesday in one tool won’t hold on Wednesday, or in the tool next door. To know where you stand, you’d have to ask the same questions again and again, in more than one wording, across every tool your buyers use.
That’s the work a platform takes off you. Ghostart samples six AI answer engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Google AI Mode. Every paid plan asks each tracked question in three different phrasings, rotated weekly, so a result isn’t the luck of one wording.
Do you know what to do with the result?
Finding out that AI names someone else is the easy half. Then you’ve got to decide what to publish and where, and that’s harder.
It depends on the kind of question. A University of Toronto study of consumer-electronics queries found that when people asked “who should I use” questions, 59–86% of the sources AI cited were third-party. For questions asked at the point of buying, 52–68% were the brand’s own pages. If you’re missing from the first kind of answer, you’ve got different work to do than if you’re missing from the second.
What you write matters too. Researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi tested changes to content and measured how visible it was in AI answers. Adding statistics improved visibility by about 33%, adding quotations by about 41% and citing sources by about 28%. Keyword stuffing reduced it by about 8%.
If you’ve already got someone who can read a set of AI answers, work out which pages are missing and write them with that kind of evidence in them, a spreadsheet may do. Most small teams don’t have that person. Ghostart turns the results into a plan, drafts the content with you and publishes to LinkedIn, WordPress, Ghost and your own site blog.
Will you measure again?
A page you’ve published tells you nothing until you ask the questions again. Nobody controls what an AI tool says, so the fair measure of the work is a record of where you stood, what you published and what the answers said afterwards.
Ghostart’s Starter plan re-checks monthly. Basic and Growth re-check core questions weekly, with the wider set, a site crawl and a digest each month. When AI cites you for a question, Ghostart proposes three to five adjacent questions to track next, and nothing’s added until a person approves it.
We do this ourselves. We’ve been running the monitor on our own tracked questions since July 2026.
Where to start
Write your five questions. If your buyers are asking them and you can’t say who AI names, bring them to https://ghostart.io and we’ll show you where you stand.