You Can Now Check Whether AI Assistants are Actually Citing Your Sustainability Claims

Back in June I wrote about what happens when someone asks an AI assistant whether your company is any good on sustainability. It doesn't hand over your neatly worded page. It reads what it can find, breaks your claim into parts, and rebuilds an answer from whatever survives. Specific, evidenced claims tend to make it through that process. Vague ones get hollowed out.

At the time, that was an argument, not a measurement. I could tell you the mechanism. I couldn't tell you which of your pages were actually surviving it, and which were being quietly ignored. That's changed.

Where to look

Google Analytics 4 added an "AI Assistant" channel back in May, and there's finally enough traffic running through it to be worth checking. In GA4, go to Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and look at the Session default channel group dimension. AI Assistant should be sitting there next to Organic Search, Direct and Paid Social.

That channel captures visits GA4 attributes to someone asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or a similar tool, and being sent to your site off the back of it. Add a comparison on the Pages and screens report, set the dimension to Session default channel group, and filter to AI Assistant. What comes back is a list of exactly which pages on your site an AI assistant is actually sending people to.

What it won't show you

One gap worth knowing before you get too excited. This channel doesn't include Google's own AI Overviews or AI Mode. Clicks from those still get filed under ordinary Organic Search, indistinguishable from a normal blue link. If most of the traffic to your sustainability pages comes from someone searching directly on Google rather than asking a separate chatbot, the AI Assistant number on its own will understate how much of your traffic is genuinely AI-mediated. Treat it as one instrument, not the full picture.

The useful bit

Pull the report. Look at which pages show up under AI Assistant. Then ask the question that actually matters: are these your most specific pages, the ones with a number, a certification, a named methodology? Or are they the vaguest ones on the site, the pages that lead with "sustainable" and never quite say why?

If it's the specific pages, that's your evidence the June argument holds up in practice, not just in theory. If it's the vague ones, or almost nothing shows up under that channel at all, that's worth knowing too. Either way, you've swapped a hunch for a number.

A concrete version of that: a page that says "we use sustainable packaging" versus one that says "40% recycled ocean-bound plastic, certified by a named body, verified this year." If an AI assistant is choosing between the two when someone asks about your packaging, it isn't picking on vibes. It's picking on what it can actually verify and repeat without getting itself in trouble. Now you can check which one of yours it's actually choosing.

A second data point pointing the same way

There's a study out last month that makes a related argument from a different angle. SE Ranking looked at over 50,000 commercial keywords and found that in 88% of cases where a business had paid for a placement inside Google's AI Mode, its site still wasn't among the sources the AI actually cited for that query. They controlled for domain authority and backlinks. Paying for the ad slot didn't buy the citation.

Put the two findings side by side and they say the same thing twice. Being visible to an AI system and being trusted by one are different jobs. You can pay your way into the first. Nobody has worked out how to pay your way into the second. You still have to earn it, with a claim specific enough, and evidenced enough, to survive being pulled apart and put back together by a machine that owes you nothing.

None of this changes what I said in June. It just means you no longer have to take my word for it, you can go and look. And if you want a second opinion on whether a specific claim of yours would survive that process, that's exactly what the free 10-Point Claim Check is for, and why I'm offering free claim checks on our My Green Comms app.