Comparison pages in your category mention the brand. Recommendation answers are built from comparison content.
For a representative buyer question in your category ("best X for Y"), the check looks at the comparison articles, "best of" lists and community threads that engines retrieve and asks whether your brand appears in them. This is judged by a person on the full check.
Recommendation answers are built from comparison content. When a buyer asks "which CRM for a small agency", the engine retrieves the roundups and names the brands in them. A brand absent from the roundups is absent from the answer — however good its own site is.
Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity your buyer question and look at the sources they cite. Open those pages. Are you there?
What the agent does: the agent shows which roundups name competitors and not you; getting listed is a conversation between people.
Part of the 23 checks · group: External sources — comparison pages, press and reviews about your category that AI engines read.
It needs the buyer question asked, the sources retrieved and a person reading them. The free check is a structural read of your pages; the full check includes this pass.
The page check reads your public pages from outside and runs all 22 — free, no signup, no AI engine involved.