An AI visibility audit checks what AI tools say about your business for real buyer questions, which sources they cite, whether AI crawlers can read your site, whether your pages answer buyer questions, and whether your facts are consistent everywhere. Record answers over repeated runs, compare with competitors, then fix crawl problems and wrong facts first.
Before you start
- Write down the questions buyers ask before they know your name: best-of, alternatives, comparisons, pricing and “near me” questions.
- List your main competitors.
- Pick the AI tools to check and set up a spreadsheet: date, tool, question, run, named (yes/no), position, competitors named, cited links, accuracy notes.
1. What AI says about you
- Ask each question in a fresh, logged-out session, more than once per tool.
- Record whether you’re named and where in the list.
- Record how you’re described, and flag anything wrong: category, prices, locations, who you serve.
- Record which competitors are named instead.
- For Google, note whether an AI Overview appeared at all, then try the same question in AI Mode.
- Work out your mention rate per tool (answers naming you divided by total answers).
2. Which sources AI cites
- Collect every cited link from the answers.
- Count how often your own pages are cited, and which ones.
- Group the other sources: review sites, lists and comparison articles, forums, directories, videos, news.
- Check whether you’re present and accurately described on the most-cited ones.
3. Can AI crawlers read your site?
Basic hygiene
- robots.txt doesn’t block crawlers you want: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Claude), PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User (Perplexity), Googlebot and Bingbot.
- Your firewall or bot-protection settings aren’t quietly blocking those crawlers.
- Key pages are indexed in Google and Bing.
- Important facts are in page text, not only in images, PDFs or scripts.
- Pages you want quoted don’t use nosnippet.
4. Do your pages answer buyer questions?
Tested in research
- Each main buyer question has a page that answers it in the first two sentences.
- A clear pricing page exists, even if it shows “from” prices or ranges.
- Fair comparison pages cover your main competitors.
- Service or product pages say plainly who each one is for.
- Headings match how buyers phrase their questions.
- Claims are backed by specifics and sources.
5. Are your facts consistent?
Basic hygiene
- The same name, description, category and audience on your site, profiles and listings.
- Organization schema that matches the visible page, and passes a structured data validator.
- Outdated facts (old prices, discontinued products, old addresses) corrected at the source.
6. Decide what to fix first
- Anything that blocks crawling or indexing.
- Wrong facts AI repeats about you.
- Missing answer pages for the questions where competitors are named and you aren’t.
- Missing or weak presence on the sites AI cites most in your field.
Then re-run the same questions on a schedule and track the trend. Prefer to have it done for you? Our AI visibility audit covers this checklist, and we can make the fixes too. See a sample report.
Frequently asked questions
How often should we run this checklist?
Run the full checklist once to set a baseline, then re-check the answers on a regular schedule (monthly suits most businesses) and repeat the site checks after any redesign or major content change.
Can we do this ourselves?
Yes. Everything here can be checked by hand with a spreadsheet. The hard parts are keeping the method consistent and finding time to repeat it. That’s what a paid AI visibility audit takes off your plate.
Which AI tools should we include?
Start with the ones your buyers use. ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode cover most people; add Perplexity, Claude or Microsoft Copilot if your buyers use them.
Does blocking Google-Extended remove us from AI Overviews?
No. Per Google’s list of its crawlers, Google-Extended controls whether content is used for Gemini models and doesn’t affect inclusion in Google Search, including its AI features, which rely on Googlebot.
You run your business. We check what AI says about you and make the fixes for you. Small Business plan: $999.