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Guest post 1 HEADLINE: Five Things to Check Right Now to Find Out If AI Is Recommending You or Your Competitor, From the First AEO-Certified PR Agency That Has Audited 200 Professionals SUBHEADLINE: Every professional brand has an AI presence right now. It is either working for you or against you. Here are the five checks that show you which, in under ten minutes, at no cost.

Open ChatGPT right now. Search your name and your professional specialty. Then search your specialty and your city.

What comes back is your AI presence the version of you that every prospective client sees before reaching out. It is shaping first impressions before any human conversation takes place.

And most professionals have never looked at it.

The first AEO-certified PR agency has audited 200 professional AI presences. 88% are absent or inaccurate. Here are the five checks that show you exactly where yours stands.

Check One: Search Your Name on ChatGPT The most consistently surprising check of the five.

Search your full name, then your name with your specialty. Document what comes back: the firm attributed to you, the credentials mentioned, whether the description is current or years out of date.

The most common finding is not complete absence. It's an outdated citation. An attorney at a firm they left three years ago. A physician with a hospital affiliation that ended. A financial advisor with a specialization they evolved away from. Present in AI, but in a version that no longer exists.

Check Two: Search Your Name on Gemini Gemini draws on Google's knowledge graph, making this check specifically diagnostic for the highest-impact missing signal in most first audits.

The most common Gemini finding is institutional citation without individual differentiation. The hospital is cited. The firm is cited. The individual inside it is invisible. This pattern has one primary cause: the absence of a verified individual Google Knowledge Panel. Present in 100% of correctly cited professionals. Present in only 14% before first AEO engagement.

Check Three, Search Your Name on Perplexity and Look at the Sources Perplexity shows its sources, which makes it the most diagnostically useful check in the audit.

Look at what Perplexity is citing to generate its description of you. Press releases and directories, no editorial weight. Genuine placements in recognized publications real citation authority. If no schema markup is present on your website, Perplexity is inferring who you are

from unstructured text. FAQPage schema implemented this week produces measurable citation improvements within days.

Check Four, Search Your Category Without Your Name The competitive positioning check the one that produces the most immediate urgency.

Search your specialty and city across all four platforms without your name. Who appears?

Document every name that comes back. Some may be less accomplished than you. But they are appearing in the AI-generated answers your prospective clients are reading, and you are not.

Check Five: Search Your Name on Google for a Knowledge Panel Open Google on desktop. Search your full name. Look at the right sidebar.

If a Knowledge Panel appears, is it accurate? If nothing appears, this is your highest-impact missing signal. The Knowledge Panel is present in 100% of correctly cited professionals and in only 14% before first engagement. It feeds directly into Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Every day it is absent is a day AI is describing you institutionally rather than you individually.

What to Do With What You Find Address the gaps in sequence. Entity consistency first, free, immediate, cross-platform. Schema markup second, deployable this week; Perplexity improvements within days. Knowledge Panel third, built through editorial coverage, schema, and entity consistency working together.

Genuine editorial coverage fourth. Wikipedia assessment fifth.

The five checks take ten minutes. What they show you is the most clarifying document in your professional brand strategy right now.