Get the most out of Shark AI Visibility.
Buyer research is moving into AI. The question that used to pull up your website now pulls up an AI-written answer, and either you are named in it or a competitor is. Shark AI Visibility does two jobs: it gets you into the conversations the AI engines trust, and it makes your own site easy for those engines to read. This guide walks you through both, in order. You do not need to be technical. Twenty minutes here makes everything that follows make sense.
The big idea
AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity build their answers from two things: the sources they already trust (a huge share of which is Reddit), and websites they can easily read and quote. So there are two ways to win, and we help with both. Show up helpfully in the conversations, and make your site easy for AI to understand. Do both and you start showing up inside the answer, which is the new first page of Google. Everything below is just those two ideas, step by step.
Start here: set up your Reddit account
Before anything else, get the account right. Reddit is suspicious of accounts that look like a business, and it rewards ones that look like a real person. Spend ten minutes on this once and it pays off for months.
Your name: real you, or a persona?
Either works, and it is a real choice worth making on purpose. Using your real first name and face builds the most trust and ties the reputation to you personally, which is great if you are the face of the business. A persona (a consistent, real-sounding handle that is not your legal name) keeps your privacy while still reading as a human. What you must not do is post as the company itself. Pick sara_bakes, not RiseBakeryOfficial.
Put your company link in your profile, not your comments
This is the important one. Reddit lets you add a website and a short bio to your profile, and a link there is completely safe. A link dropped into a comment is the opposite: most communities auto-remove it and it can get a young account banned. So put your company URL in your profile now. Then, when your comments are genuinely helpful, people click your name, see who you are, and find your site on their own. You get the click without ever risking the account.
The rest of the profile
Fill in a one-sentence bio that says what you do and where ("Baker in Asbury Park. Ask me about sourdough."), set a display name that reads like a person with a hint of context ("Sara at Rise Bakery"), add a simple avatar, and join the communities your customers hang out in. A complete, human-looking profile is what gets you past the spam filters on the subreddits that matter.
What to expect on Reddit (the rules that keep you safe)
Reddit is not a place you can show up and start promoting on day one. It has strong instincts against spam, and crossing them quietly gets your comments hidden or your account banned, often without a warning. Here is what to expect and how to stay on the right side of it.
You have to age and warm up the account
A brand-new account has almost no privileges and gets filtered fast. For the first week or two, just be a normal user: read, upvote, and leave a few genuine comments on things you actually care about, with no mention of your business at all. That builds account age and karma (Reddit's trust points), which is what lets you post in the bigger communities. If you hit a "you are doing that too much" message early on, that is the warm-up working, not you doing something wrong.
Do not post links in comments
We said it above and it is worth repeating, because it is the single fastest way to get banned. Keep your links in your profile. If you ever feel the urge to paste a URL into a comment, that is your cue to instead describe the answer in plain words and let people find you. Run every draft through Reply Coach on your dashboard first: it flags links, salesy phrasing, and anything that reads AI-written, before you hit post.
Do not spam, and do not argue
No copy-pasting the same comment across subreddits, no "DM me and I'll send the link" bait, and do not fire off ten comments in an hour (that reads as a bot). Spread your activity across days. Aim for about four genuinely helpful comments for every one that mentions your business, and when you do mention it, use the same wording each time (that consistency is part of how AI ends up citing you). If a comment gets downvoted, leave it alone. Arguing with downvotes never ends well.
It is a slow build, and that is normal
This is not an ads channel where you pay and leads appear tomorrow. The first month is setup and warm-up. Traffic tends to start around days 30 to 90. AI citations, the real prize, usually land between 90 and 180 days, first in Perplexity and Google's AI answers. Knowing the timeline up front keeps you from quitting right before it works.
Reading your AI Visibility report
Twice a month we ask the real questions your customers ask, across the three answer engines, and measure whether you show up. Here is what each part means.
Your visibility score
One number, 0 to 100, for how often you surface when AI answers questions in your category. Treat it as a trend line, not a grade. Watch the direction over a few reports, not the exact figure on any single one.
The three engines, and the one blind spot
We check ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity separately, because they answer and cite differently. Lean on Perplexity: its citations are the most stable and easiest to act on. Gemini varies run to run, so treat it as a hint, not gospel.
One thing we cannot see: Google's AI Overviews is the biggest AI answer surface of all, and it has no way for any tool to read it directly, including this one. We would rather tell you that than pretend the picture is complete.
Named, cited, or missed (and who got named instead)
Every question-by-engine box is one of three things: named (the answer mentions you), cited (it links you as a source), or missed (neither). The report also lists who got named instead, ranked by how often, so you can see exactly which competitors the engines are handing your customers to.
Reddit threads AI is citing
When the engines answer, they often cite specific Reddit threads. We pull those and check whether you are present. The valuable row is the one where AI cites the thread and you are not in it: an open door into a conversation the models already trust. That is a thread to go add a genuinely helpful comment to.
Listicles and articles AI is citing (your outreach list)
This is the one to act on. The report shows the third-party "best of" lists, roundups, and articles the engines pull from when they answer your category's questions, and flags which ones do not mention you yet. Each of those is a warm outreach target: the AI is already recommending from that page, so reach out to whoever runs it and ask to be added, pitch a listing, or correct the omission. It is one of the best half-hours you can spend, because you are not cold-pitching. You are asking to be included on a page that is already feeding your buyers' answers.
Make your site easy for AI to read
Before AI can recommend you, it has to be able to reach, understand, and trust your site. The free AEO site audit on your dashboard scores any URL (yours or a prospect's) across four simple ideas, then lists the exact fixes ranked by impact.
The four things it checks
Findable: can AI crawlers even reach the page (HTTPS, a sitemap, and you have not accidentally blocked the AI bots). Quotable: is there real content to summarize, and is it fresh. Understandable: is the page cleanly structured so a machine can parse it. Trustworthy: does it look like a real, well-connected business. You do not need to memorize these. The audit just tells you what is failing and what to do.
The fastest win: freshness
Almost nobody tells search engines when a page was last updated. Adding a "last updated" date is a small change that moves your score noticeably and signals to AI that your page is current. After that, just work the audit's failing items top to bottom by point value, and watch the effect on your next report.
Schema: small for Google, big for ChatGPT
"Schema" (also called structured data) is a small block of hidden code on a page that spells out the facts in a format machines read perfectly: this is a local business, here is its name, phone, and hours; or this is an article by this author, published on this date; or this page answers these questions. Your visitors never see it. Machines do.
What schema does, and does not do
Most people get this backwards. Adding schema usually will not move your Google rankings. Google's own studies, and independent ones, show little to no ranking effect from it, and Google is even retiring some of its old schema-powered results. So if someone sells you schema as a Google ranking trick, be skeptical.
Why it still matters here
AI engines, ChatGPT especially, lean on structured data because it removes all guesswork: the facts are handed to them in plain, labeled form. Independent testing has shown that adding business schema measurably improves how often, and how high, ChatGPT mentions a business. In other words, schema is one of the cheapest, most direct levers you have on your AI visibility, even though it is a weak one for Google. That is exactly why we built it in.
How to use the Schema markup generator
On your dashboard, paste in a page URL and it writes the right schema for you: it figures out whether the page is a business, an article, a product, or an FAQ, and generates the code. Copy the block it gives you, paste it into that page's header area (the generator tells you exactly where, with tips for WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, and GoHighLevel), and use one block per page on the page it describes. No developer needed. You can generate up to 20 pages a month.
Your weekly loop
The report tells you where to show up. Your daily email hands you the specific threads to reply to, each with the angle to take. About thirty minutes a week keeps it moving.
Find the right communities
Use the Subreddit finder on your dashboard. Search what your team actually knows, not your business name: a brunch spot searches "eggs benedict", "hollandaise", "food cost", and its city, not its own brand. Run a few angles and save the subreddits that show up across more than one.
Comment so people actually upvote you
Lead with the answer in the very first line, because phones hide everything after it. Speak from real experience, the kind of specific detail only you would know: the number, the mistake you made, the workaround you found. A clean Reply Coach verdict means your draft does not read like a robot; it does not mean the comment is good. The detail is what earns upvotes and gets you cited later.
How your week is structured
Your emails vary by day so you stay present without inbox fatigue: ranked opportunity digests, an upvote and warm-up day, a competitor-watch day showing where rivals got mentioned, and a lighter weekend one. Good Quora questions ride along when they come up. Find posts now on the dashboard pulls fresh threads on demand between emails.
A few more controls
Customize the questions we ask
By default we generate fifty buyer-intent questions for your category and ask the same ones every report, so your score stays comparable over time. If you know the exact phrases your customers use, open AI report prompts in your brand settings and type your own, one per line. Your list replaces the automatic set on your next report. Clear the box to go back to the automatic questions (we keep them, so your trend line picks right back up). One thing to know: changing the questions resets the comparison, because you are now measuring a different set, so change them on purpose and then let a few reports build the new baseline.
On-demand reports
On top of the twice-monthly reports, you can run two extra reports per brand each month, resetting on the 1st. You will not need them often, since visibility moves slowly. Save them for after you have changed your site or published something and want to see the effect.
Send to your team or client
Each brand can route its digest and report to a different inbox, and CC up to two more people, so an account manager and the client's web person get the same emails you do.
That is the whole playbook: set up the account, stay safe, read the report, fix the site, and work the loop. Questions, or something not adding up? Email support@sharksuite.ai and a human will help.
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