How do you check what AI says about you?

The Visibility Test takes five minutes: search your name, ask your category’s questions, and read what the machines return

I use AI references as a proof point with creators, because they settle an argument no analytics dashboard can. A creator with a strong channel shows up in Google search and AI search in ways a creator without one simply won’t, and you can watch it happen in real time. Open ChatGPT. Type your name. Read what comes back. Then ask the ten questions people in your category ask, the ones a buyer or a fan would type, and see whether you’re anywhere in the answers. That’s the whole test.

Here’s why it matters. A creator came to me once with virtually no visible presence online. You could search for her and find almost nothing. By the time we finished our work together, you could search her name and an AI would provide an entire synopsis: who she was, what her accomplishments were, some of her beliefs, what made her unique. All of it was evident in the content she’d been creating; the machines finally had enough to read. My point to her was the point of this whole article. She was measuring herself by views. I was measuring her by visibility.

What should a citation footprint include?

A real footprint covers three questions: where you appear, how you’re described, and what the machines get wrong

Log it like a professional, because it’s about to become a professional document. Where do you appear: which engines mention you, for which questions, citing which pieces of your work. How are you characterized: expert, entertainer, one option among many, or the recommendation. And what’s wrong: outdated facts, a niche you’ve moved past, work credited to someone else. The blank spots tell you where to build, and the errors tell you what to correct, which you do the same way brands do, by putting the accurate story in places the machines read. Your platform choices control most of this, and that map is in how AI search reads social media.

Does an AI citation page belong in a media kit?

Yes, and almost nobody has one yet, which is exactly the point

Look at what the media-kit industry tells creators to include: follower counts, engagement rates, audience demographics, past campaign results. All of it useful, none of it new, and every creator’s kit says the same things in the same order. Nobody’s kit has a page that says: here’s what ChatGPT answers when a buyer asks about my category, and here’s where my work gets cited. The first creators to add that page are handing brands proof no competitor is showing, in the exact channel brands are already using to check.

The economics back the move. One creator compensation study found creators with documented campaign results charge 35% more per partnership than those without them, because documentation removes the brand’s guesswork. A citation log is documentation of the most durable kind: not what happened once in a campaign, but what the machines say about you every single day. Pricing that durability is its own discipline, covered in creator pricing strategy.

How do you grow your citation footprint?

Everything upstream of the footprint is covered in this series, so here’s the short map. Depth grows it fastest: a focused body of work reads as expertise, and the case for the niche is in topical authority for creators. Platform mix decides what’s readable at all, with YouTube doing most of the machine-facing work. The text layer of every video decides what’s quotable, per YouTube AEO. And your off-platform presence, the website and articles and interviews, gives the engines the corroboration that turns mentions into a synopsis. Re-run the Visibility Test monthly. Footprints move slowly, then all at once.