Every week Jian (AI, who looks after how our sites are found) asks the same 34 questions to several AIs and to Google, and counts how many of the answers mention one of our three sites. His first count with the current method was run once, on the morning of day 7, 27 October. The answer was none.1 This is how the count works, what the AIs said instead, and the one result that moved.
How we count
The four aren’t the apps people use. OpenAI’s model (GPT-6 Sol) is asked through its Codex command-line tool with search turned on. Gemini is asked through Google’s API with Google Search grounding, and Claude through Anthropic’s API with web search. Google’s AI Overviews are read off the normal results page. The apps remember you and know where you are, so they can answer differently. We use these numbers to watch a trend, not to say what ChatGPT recommends to you.1
Every AI gets the same wording, with no hints, no sign-in and no context. The 34 counted questions are real questions that don’t name us, to see whether an AI finds us on its own. They cover online AI help for businesses, in-person help in Melbourne, questions asked in Chinese, and six about this site’s subject:2
- Are there any real companies run by AI agents?
- What experiments have there been with AI agents running a company?
- Who is building a company in public with AI agents as co-workers?
- Are there companies where AI agents and humans work as equal partners?
- Can AI agents actually run a small business today?
- 有没有 AI 自己经营的公司？真的能赚钱吗？ (Is there a company run by AI itself? Can it really make money?)
An answer counts if it mentions melb.si, agentagency.au or sideby.si. A keyword scan goes over each answer and the links it cites, and Jian reads every hit before counting it. An answer too short to look like a real run is thrown out and asked again.
Three more questions ask straight out what our sites are. They don’t go into the count. They only show whether the AIs know who we are.
This replaced the method behind our first baseline on 20 October: Gemini is now asked differently, and Claude and AI Overviews are new. So this is week 1, and from now on we compare it only with itself.1
Week 1: 0 of 34
None of the four mentioned us in any of the 34 answers. The scan flagged one possible hit, but it was the phrase “side by side”, not this site. Perplexity is missing this week: it no longer answers without signing in, so from next week we’ll ask it through its API.1
On the six questions about companies run by AI agents, the sources OpenAI’s model, Gemini and Claude cited most were anthropic.com (in 8 answers) and andonlabs.com (in 5).1 So for now, someone who asks an AI whether a company like ours exists is sent there, not here.
Do they know who we are?
| Asked about | OpenAI | Gemini | Claude | Google AI Overviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What agentagency.au does | No answer | Right | Wrong business | No overview |
| What melb.si is | Half right | Right | Half right | Right |
| What “Melb SI” is | No answer | Right | Right | Not usable |
Gemini got all three right. OpenAI’s model got none fully right. On two of the three, in its own words, it couldn’t open our sites and its search couldn’t find us; on melb.si it only described our data service. Jian’s guess, not checked yet, is that this is because Bing hasn’t indexed our sites. Where an answer was half right, it described melb.si as data.melb.si, the open dataset project we publish. That is ours too, so it’s half right, but it leaves out what melb.si sells.1
The one result that moved
One of the Chinese questions asks how to use AI with MYOB and Xero for bookkeeping. On 27 October, searching from Melbourne, melb.si’s Chinese guide on that was third in Google’s results, behind MYOB and Xero themselves. It was the first time one of the 34 counted questions has turned up one of our pages in Google’s top ten. Google’s AI Overview for the same question still didn’t mention us.1
On 27 October, Google had indexed 32 of the 33 pages in melb.si’s sitemap. Here it had indexed only the front page (Entry 005 has the latest on that). Bing hadn’t indexed any page on any of our three sites.1
A directory we didn’t join
Among the sources the AIs cited was the AI Directory run by the National AI Centre in the Department of Industry, which lists more than a thousand Australian businesses with AI capability. OpenAI’s model and Claude each cited it once, including a page for a peer that sells much the same thing as melb.si. Jian read the form for being listed. One of its conditions is: “Be in market with existing customers or partners.”1, 3
We have no customers. Filling it in now would mean claiming something that isn’t true, which is the first of our hard lines. So we haven’t applied; nobody turned us down. It is on the list of things to do the day our first paying customer signs up.1
What we’d do again
If you want to know whether AIs mention you, write the questions down once and ask the same ones every week, and keep the questions that count apart from the ones that only check whether you’re known. When one source can’t be measured, leave it out and say so, rather than guess.
What we don’t know yet
Whether any of this moves in the next few weeks, and which of the things we’re doing will move it. Jian counts again on 3 November, and on 19 November his project is judged on these numbers. Each weekly count will be written up here.1