The Shortlist Test: How to Find Out If You're One of the Names AI Gives Your Next Client Body
Last time, we showed you what happened when we asked ChatGPT for an executive coach “ Executive Coach AEO: How to Rank in AI Search Results — Danu Agency“: the same four names, every time, and one of them wasn't even taking clients anymore. That raised an obvious question we didn't answer — how do you find out if you're one of the names, or nowhere near the list at all?
You run the test yourself. It takes fifteen minutes, and 45% of marketing leaders admit they still can't accurately measure their own visibility in AI-generated answers, according to SEMrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index (126 million AI search prompts, January–April 2026, 22 industries). Most businesses haven't looked. That's the opening.
Ask the question a client would ask, not the question about you
"What do you know about [your business name]?" tells you what a model has indexed. It doesn't tell you if you'd ever get recommended. Ask what a prospect actually types to a chatbot: "Who's a good executive coach for a first-time CEO?" "I need a coach who works with founders on delegation — any recommendations?" "Best executive coach in [your city/industry]?" Run three or four of these, worded the way a real client would word them, not the way you'd word them about yourself.
Run it on ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity separately — don't assume one result covers all three
They don't pull from the same places, and they don't agree with each other nearly as often as you'd expect. Per the same Semrush study, ChatGPT cites an average of 15 sources per response versus Gemini's 3 — a big enough gap that the platforms are functionally reading different amounts of the web before they answer. And across the four major platforms they tracked, only 36 brands held top-100 visibility on all four, every single month. Showing up on ChatGPT tells you nothing about whether you show up on Perplexity. You have to check each one.
Perplexity is the one to slow down on — it shows its work
Unlike a flat ChatGPT answer, Perplexity lists the actual pages it pulled from. That's the most useful five minutes of this whole exercise: click through and see whether the source describing you is your own site, a directory listing that hasn't been updated since 2023, or nothing you control at all. If a third party's stale profile is the thing an AI is citing about you, that's not a visibility problem — it's a message control problem, and it's fixable in a way "just being more visible" isn't.
A blank result isn't actually the worst outcome
The worst outcome is being mentioned wrong — the way Michael Bungay Stanier's old 1:1 coaching offer is still what some models describe, even though his business has moved on. Not showing up at all just means there's nothing to correct yet. Showing up with the wrong specialty, the wrong price point, or an offer you don't run anymore means a prospect already made a decision about you based on information that isn't true, and you'll never know it happened.
Log what you find, then stop
Write down, for each platform: were you mentioned, was it accurate, and whose page did the citation point to. Don't try to fix everything the same afternoon — that's how good instincts turn into ten scattered changes with no order to them. This list is your starting punch list, not your to-do list for today.
Want a second pair of eyes on what you found — or want us to run the whole test properly, across all three, and tell you exactly which sentence on which page is the fix? That's the Free AI Visibility Check for Executive Coaches on our For Coaches page. Email hello@danu-agency.ai and we'll have results back to you this week.
