How we measure AI search for a Pulaski business — and the numbers we ignore
AI search is new enough that plenty of people will sell you a report full of impressive-looking numbers that mean nothing. Getting mentioned by ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, or Perplexity when someone asks "who does this in Pulaski" is real and worth pursuing — but only if you measure the things that actually predict a phone call. Here is how we tell whether it is working.
The core measurement is straightforward and manual: we ask the AI tools the questions your customers ask. "Best [your trade] in Pulaski VA." "Who installs [your service] near Claytor Lake." "[Your trade] in the New River Valley." We run those prompts on a schedule and record three things — whether you get named, whether the AI describes you accurately, and whether it cites a source that points back to your site. Being named is the headline. Being cited is the durable win, because a citation means the model is pulling from a page we can keep improving.
We also track accuracy, which people forget matters. An AI tool that mentions you but lists the wrong hours, an old phone number, or a service you dropped is actively costing you customers. Half our AI-search work is just making sure the web says one true, consistent thing about your business so the models repeat it correctly. In a small market, one confused answer can send a ready-to-buy customer to a competitor in Dublin or Wytheville instead.
Then we watch the downstream signal that ties it together: referral traffic and calls that trace back to these tools. When your analytics start showing visits from AI assistants, or a customer says "ChatGPT sent me," that is the number that pays your bills. It is slower to move than a ranking, so we treat it as confirmation rather than a weekly scoreboard.
Now the vanity metrics we deliberately ignore. We do not report a made-up "AI visibility score" — nobody outside our spreadsheet can verify it, and it does not correlate with revenue. We do not count how often you appear for prompts no Pulaski customer would ever type. We do not celebrate a mention in a generic answer that names ten businesses with no link, because that rarely drives a click. And we are skeptical of any tool promising a precise "AI ranking" — these systems are non-deterministic, meaning the same question can return a different answer an hour later, so a single-point-in-time rank is noise dressed as data.
- Named in answers to real Pulaski and New River Valley questions
- Cited with a link back to a page we control
- Described accurately — correct name, hours, services, and area
- Actual referral traffic and calls attributed to AI tools
We report these honestly, including the months where the answer is "not yet." The work that earns AI mentions is the same clean, well-structured, genuinely-useful content that earns everything else — which is why our SEO and AI-search efforts pull in the same direction rather than competing for budget.