Do we appear in LLM search results? Are we cited?

Road Scholar, a leading US not-for-profit educational travel organisation, serves an audience that is rapidly adopting AI tools for trip planning. Road Scholar came to us with a question that most brands cannot answer today: “when people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews about the type of trips we offer, do we appear, and are we cited?”

No off-the-shelf tool could provide an answer across all three platforms, with real user phrasing. So, we built the measurement tool ourselves.

Our strategy

In order to give our client the information they need about how popular LLMs share information about their products, we built direct API connections to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini. This enabled us to capture results from each platform itself, rather than estimating what those results might be.

With the API connections in place, we tested 140 real-world prompts, written the way people actually talk to AI (“We’re experienced travelers in our early 70s, prone to motion sickness…”), not as bare keywords, across the brand’s core topics and intents.

Based on these prompt tests, we measured what matters: whether an AI answer appears, whether the brand is cited in it, which sources the AI trusts for each topic, and how fresh those sources are.

In addition, we scored the site against our 5-pillar LLM Readiness framework: content quality and E-E-A-T, technical crawlability, semantic relevance, user experience and intent, and brand authority.

Results at a glance

• 90% AI Overview presence 

• Google shows an AI answer for 9 of 10 priority queries, and Road Scholar is cited in 90% of those answers.

• ChatGPT answered 99% of prompts with a web-sourced response, citing 8 source domains on average, and roadscholar.org was its most-cited domain across the tested set.

• Gemini answered 100% of prompts, averaging 10 cited sources per answer.

• Overall LLM Readiness score: 81.6%, with a prioritised issues report across all five pillars.

What these numbers mean in practical terms

The results of this project enabled Road Scholar to prioritise fixes and improve their overall SEO organic traffic and rankings. They could identify revenue gaps too. For example, our data showed that high intent costs questions, such as “how much does it cost to cruise the Great Lakes” returned no AI answers and no brand presence. As a result, a clearly sourced pricing guide was added to the content plan and the gap was filled. 

Eight months after adding the audit’s prioritised fixes to the client’s roadmap, Road Scholar witnessed huge improvements, as is evident in the data provided by Semrush for the period (October 2025 to May 2026, estimated data). 

• Organic traffic grew 50%, from ~172,000 to ~258,000 estimated monthly visits.
• Keywords appearing in Google AI Overviews grew 152%, from 1,409 to 3,552, exactly the surface the audit was built to win.
• Top 3 rankings grew 70%, from 2,617 to 4,450 keywords.
• Total ranking keywords grew 22%, from 92,338 to 112,895.

This project for Road Scholar demonstrates just how valuable it is to understand how LLMs rank your products and content. As in this case, that understanding can be used to inform your strategy so that it delivers more organic traffic and better keyword rankings.