AI visibility audit: find out whether AI recommends you, or your competitor
An AI visibility audit measures what ChatGPT, Google’s AI answers, Gemini and Perplexity currently say when somebody asks them to recommend a business like yours. It records whether you are named, which competitors are named instead, which sources those answers were built from, and what is stopping you being one of them. Ours is free, it takes about a week, and it ends with a written fix list in priority order.
Most owners find out they are invisible to AI the way you probably did: by asking it yourself and not being there. This is the same question asked properly, across every assistant, against a fixed set of your customers’ real questions, with the answer written down.
No contract. No exit fee. Your domain and Google accounts stay in your name.
01 Definition
What is an AI visibility audit?
It is a measurement, not a service you subscribe to. A fixed set of twenty to forty questions your customers actually ask is run across the major AI assistants, cold, and the answers are recorded: who was named, who was cited, who was ignored, and what the assistants leaned on to decide.
The word audit is doing real work there. An audit produces a document about the state of something today. It is not a retainer, it does not commit you to anything, and a good one should be just as useful to somebody who takes it and fixes everything themselves.
The reason it has to be a fixed question set is that assistants are not deterministic. Ask the same thing twice and you can get two different lists of businesses. One screenshot of ChatGPT naming you proves very little, and one screenshot of it naming a competitor proves even less. A frozen set of questions, run the same way each time, is the difference between a measurement and an anecdote.
- Named
- The assistant told the customer to contact you. This is the one that matters, and it is the hardest to get.
- Cited
- The assistant used your page as a source and linked it, then may well have recommended somebody else in the same answer.
- Absent
- You did not appear at all. Usually a retrieval problem or a corroboration problem rather than a content problem.
- Misattributed
- You were named but described wrongly: the wrong services, the wrong town, the wrong phone number, or confused with a similarly named business.
02 Deliverables
What the audit actually reports
Five things: where you stand today, who is being recommended instead of you, what those recommendations were built from, what is blocking you technically, and the fix list in the order we would do it.
Your baseline across every assistant
Your fixed question set run cold through ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, with each answer recorded as named, cited, absent or misattributed. This is the number every later month gets compared against.
The competitor list, and why it is them
Every business the assistants named in your place, how often each one appeared, and what they have that you do not: reviews, profile completeness, third-party mentions, or simply pages that answer the question being asked.
The sources behind the answers
Which pages, directories, review platforms and articles the assistants drew on. This is usually the most surprising part of the report, because it is rarely the sites owners expect and it tells you exactly where to be.
What is blocking retrieval
Crawl and index health, whether AI crawlers are allowed in your robots.txt, Core Web Vitals, structured data, and whether your business identity is consistent enough for a model to treat your profiles as one business rather than several.
The fix list, in order
Every finding written as a task, ranked by what will move visibility soonest for the least work, with the ones you can do yourself marked as such. Yours to keep and hand to anyone, including another agency.
03 The useful part
Seeing which competitors get recommended over your brand
This is the part of the report most owners read first, and it is the most actionable. Knowing that an assistant recommends three named competitors ahead of you turns a vague worry into a list of specific, checkable differences.
An assistant does not invent a recommendation. It assembles one from what already exists about each business across the internet, then writes it in a confident sentence. So when it picks a competitor over you, the reason is almost always visible in the raw material, and it is usually one of a small number of things.
Being cited is not being recommended
It is entirely normal for an assistant to quote your page as its source and then tell the customer to call somebody else. It happens to sites that rank well, and it is why citation screenshots make such poor progress reports.
Being quoted is a content problem: your page answered the question well. Being recommended is a trust problem, and it is settled mostly by things that are not on your website at all. The audit separates the two, because the fix for each is completely different.
| What the assistant found | What that usually means | What the audit checks |
|---|---|---|
| They are described precisely, you are described vaguely | Your pages never state plainly what you do and where | Whether each service and service area is stated in text a model can lift |
| They have corroboration, you only have your own website | Nobody outside your own domain confirms you exist | Mentions, listings, association and registry entries, local press |
| Their reviews say the thing the customer asked about | Review text is read as content, not counted as a score | What your reviews actually say, not just how many stars |
| They were readable, you were not | A crawl, speed or blocking problem stopped retrieval entirely | robots.txt, AI crawler access, index coverage, Core Web Vitals |
| They are one clear business, you look like two | Inconsistent name, address or phone across profiles | Identity consistency and the sameAs links tying your profiles together |
| They answered the follow-up questions too | One question becomes several searches behind the scenes | Whether your pages cover the questions that follow the first one |
04 The process
How the audit is run
About a week, five stages, and you are not asked for access to anything you would not hand a new employee. It ends with a call where we go through the findings, whether or not you ever work with us.
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We build the question set with you
Twenty to forty questions a real customer would ask an assistant, in their words, not keyword phrases. Emergency versions, price versions, comparison versions, and the ones that name your town. You approve the list before anything is run, and it is then frozen.
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The set is run cold
Every question through every major assistant, in fresh sessions with no history, so the answers are not shaped by anything we have asked before. Each response is recorded as named, cited, absent or misattributed, along with whoever was recommended instead.
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The technical baseline
Search Console, Analytics, site speed, crawl and index coverage, robots.txt and AI crawler access, structured data, and your Google Business Profile. This is where most absent results turn out to have a dull, fixable cause.
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The corroboration check
What exists about your business away from your own website: profiles, listings, registry and association entries, reviews and their text, and any mention on a page you do not control. Compared directly against the competitors the assistants named.
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The readout
A written report and a call to go through it. If the honest answer is that you have a Google Business Profile problem rather than an AI problem, that is what the report says, and it says it before anybody discusses a retainer.
05 Measurement
Platforms that track AI visibility, and where they stop
A growing number of tracking platforms will run prompts on a schedule and chart how often a brand is mentioned. They are genuinely useful for watching a trend over months. What they do not do is tell you why the answer is what it is, which is the part you need in order to change it.
A tracker reports the score. An audit explains the score. If you already know you are invisible, a subscription that confirms it monthly is an expensive way to stay informed.
The other limitation is a practical one for local businesses. Most tracking platforms are built for national brands, and an assistant’s answer to a local question changes with the location it thinks the asker is in. A tool that checks from one place will quietly miss the difference between being recommended in your own town and being recommended two suburbs over.
Check it yourself first, free
You do not need us, or a subscription, to get a rough reading today. Our free tool builds the questions a customer in your trade and town would ask, you run them yourself, and you record who got named. It runs entirely in your browser and nothing you type into it is sent anywhere.
If you would rather work through the whole thing by hand, the method is written out step by step in how to get recommended by ChatGPT and AI, including the listings that matter most and what to do about reviews. Plenty of owners have fixed the obvious problems from that article alone, which is the point of publishing it.
06 Before you hire anyone
How to choose an AI visibility consultant or agency
Ask four questions: what exactly gets measured, whether the question set is frozen, what is promised, and what you keep if you leave. The answers separate the people doing this work from the people who renamed their SEO package in 2025.
This is a new enough category that nobody has a long track record in it, including us, and you should be suspicious of anybody implying otherwise. What you can judge is the method, and whether the person explaining it is describing something measurable or something that just sounds advanced.
Nobody can guarantee a recommendation
It is worth being blunt, because this is the claim the category will fill up with. Assistants give different answers to the same question over time, no agency controls their output, and any guarantee of a recommendation is either a misunderstanding or a lie.
What is controllable is whether you are findable, whether your identity is unambiguous, whether anyone outside your own website corroborates you, and whether your mentions against a frozen question set rise over months. That is the whole of what should be promised, and it is what gets reported.
| Ask them | A good answer | A warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| What exactly will you measure? | A named set of customer questions, run across named assistants, recorded the same way every month | “Brand presence in AI” with no method attached |
| Can the question set change? | No, it is frozen, and a new one is added openly rather than swapping a losing question out | Reporting that improves while the questions quietly change |
| What are you promising? | That you will become findable, understandable and corroborated, measured monthly | A guaranteed ChatGPT recommendation, or a guaranteed position |
| How is this different from your SEO service? | A clear list of what is additional, because most of the foundation is shared | Three separate retainers for SEO, GEO and AEO |
| What do I keep if I leave? | Your domain, accounts, profiles, content and the report itself | Content or accounts held in the agency’s name |
| What will you not do? | No low-quality directory blasts, no fake reviews, no content produced by volume | Anything sold as a shortcut nobody else knows |
07 Money
What the audit costs, and what happens after
The audit is free and there is no obligation attached to it. If you want the work done afterwards, our SEO plans run $395 to $1,495 a month, with custom pricing for Dominate, month to month, with no setup fee and no contract.
The reason the audit comes first is that it is the only honest way to quote. How many services and locations you need to be visible for, the state of the site, and how competitive your market is all change the answer, and none of them can be guessed from a phone call.
It is also the only honest way to tell you not to bother. If the report shows your problem is a Google Business Profile that needs reverifying, or a site nobody can crawl, those are cheap fixes and you should make them before paying anyone a retainer. The full breakdown of what the monthly work includes is on the AI SEO page.
If paid search will bring you leads sooner than organic work will, we say so. That happens more often than an agency selling AI visibility would like to admit.
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08 Common questions
Questions owners ask before booking an audit
Can I see which competitors ChatGPT recommends instead of my business?
Yes, and it is the most useful output of the audit. Every business named in your place is recorded, with how often each one appeared and across which assistants.
The report then compares them against you on the things that actually decide it: review volume and review wording, profile completeness, mentions on sites neither of you control, and whether their pages answer the question being asked. You end up with a list of specific differences rather than a feeling that you are losing.
What platform can I use to track how AI recommends my brand?
Several tracking platforms now run prompt sets on a schedule and chart brand mentions over time, and they are reasonable for watching a trend once you already know where you stand.
Two caveats for a local business. They report the score without explaining it, so they tell you that you are absent without telling you why. And most are built for national brands, so they miss the way an assistant’s answer to a local question changes with the location of whoever is asking. An audit answers the why once; a tracker is for watching it move afterwards.
How do I choose an AI visibility consultant?
Judge the method, not the vocabulary. Ask what exactly will be measured, whether the question set is frozen between months, what is being promised, and what you keep if you leave.
The strongest signal is someone describing something you could check yourself. The weakest is a guaranteed recommendation, or three separate retainers for SEO, GEO and AEO when most of the underlying work is shared. Nobody has a long track record in this category yet, so anybody implying they do is telling you something useful about themselves.
What is the difference between an AI visibility audit and an SEO audit?
An SEO audit examines your site and asks why it does or does not rank. An AI visibility audit starts outside your site, with what assistants say about your business today, then works backwards to the causes.
There is real overlap, because crawlability, structured data and page quality decide whether you are eligible for either. The parts that do not overlap are the question set, the competitor record, and the corroboration check on sources you do not own.
Which AI assistants does the audit cover?
ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity, because those are where the questions are actually being asked. Copilot is included on request.
They are reported separately rather than averaged into one score. They retrieve differently and they disagree with each other regularly, and an average would hide the assistant where you are doing worst, which is usually the one worth fixing first.
How often should an AI visibility audit be repeated?
The full audit once, then the question set re-run monthly. The expensive part is establishing the baseline and working out the causes; re-running a frozen set afterwards is quick.
Monthly is frequent enough to see a direction and infrequent enough to ignore the noise. Assistants vary answer to answer, so a week-to-week comparison mostly measures randomness.
Does this work for a business that is not local?
Yes, though what decides it shifts. For a local business, the Google Business Profile, reviews and local corroboration carry most of the weight. For a national or online business, it moves towards third-party coverage, comparison and review sites, and whether your category is described in your own words anywhere credible.
The method is the same either way: a frozen question set, run cold, recorded consistently. The question set is what changes.
What do I actually receive at the end?
A written report and a call to go through it. The report contains your baseline across each assistant, the competitor record, the sources those answers were built from, the technical findings, and a fix list in priority order with the do-it-yourself items marked.
It is yours. You can act on it alone, hand it to your existing agency, or hand it to a different one. There is no obligation attached and nothing in it is withheld to force a follow-up.
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