AI visibility audit

An AI visibility audit records what ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews say when your buyers ask about the kind of thing you sell. It shows whether your business is named, how it is described, which competitors appear beside it and which web pages the answers lean on. It is a measurement, not a fix: you come away knowing where you stand and what is worth working on, with every finding labelled by how it was obtained.

The audit is the diagnostic part of my AI search optimisation work, and it looks at AI answers only. If you want your website’s crawling, content and links reviewed for ordinary Google rankings, a full SEO audit with a written action plan is the right commission.

What an AI visibility audit tells you

Business owners often notice AI answers by accident. A new client mentions that ChatGPT suggested you, or a colleague pastes in an answer that lists three competitors and leaves you out, or gives an address you left years ago. One answer on one day proves very little, because assistants write every reply fresh, and the result shifts with the wording, the user’s location and their chat history.

The audit replaces those anecdotes with a dated record that can be repeated. For an agreed set of questions it shows:

• how often each assistant names you, and the questions where it never does;
• whether the description is right: your services, where you work, who you work with and your price level;
• which competitors are named in your place, and how often;
• which pages and third-party sites the assistants cite, the clearest clue to where their information comes from;
• whether anything technical stops the assistants’ crawlers from reading your site.

Who this is for, and who it is not for

It suits UK businesses whose buyers research before getting in touch: software and B2B suppliers, accountants, solicitors and other professional practices, private clinics, and online shops in crowded categories. It is also worth doing before you commission generative engine optimisation, from me or anyone else, because it gives you a baseline to judge that work against.

It is less useful for a business that Google barely indexes yet, or a local trade that wins most of its work from its Google Business Profile and word of mouth. There the money does more good on the basics first. And if you already know the assistants describe you wrongly and simply want it put right, there is no need to buy the audit separately; the same measurement becomes the first step of the fix.

What the audit measures

AI visibility is easy to overstate. A single score out of 100 can hide how few prompts were run, on which day and from where. I sort every finding into one of three groups, so you can see how much weight it will bear.

How the audit runs

1. Scope and access. A short call to agree the services, places and competitors that matter. You give read-only access to GA4, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools if you use them.
2. Prompt set. I draft the questions and you correct the wording to match what buyers really ask. You approve the set before sampling starts, so the baseline is one you trust.
3. Technical checks. Crawler access, what the raw HTML shows, Bing indexing and the comparison of your facts across profiles.
4. Sampling. Every prompt run in every assistant by the stated method, with each answer saved alongside its date and the sources it cited.
5. Analysis. Answers coded for presence, accuracy and competitors named. Cited sources are grouped by type: your site, competitors’ sites, directories, review platforms, trade press and forums.
6. Walk-through. A call to go through the findings and agree what to act on first.

Problems that often show up

• A firewall or bot-protection setting blocking AI crawlers that nobody chose to block.
• An assistant repeating an old address, phone number or discontinued service taken from an outdated directory listing.
• A business the assistants know by name but never suggest for “who is good at X” questions, because no independent page links it to that need.
• A hallucination: a service, price or accreditation the business never had, filled in where the sources were silent.
• Competitors cited from comparison articles and trade directories in which the business has never appeared.

What you receive

• The approved prompt set and the full answer log in a spreadsheet you keep, with dates and every cited URL.
• A written summary for each assistant: how often you were named, how accurately, and your share of voice against the competitors we agreed.
• A source map of the sites cited for your questions, marking which of them mention you.
• A list of factual errors, with the likely source of each and how to get it corrected.
• Crawler access findings, with the exact robots.txt or firewall changes needed.
• A prioritised list of next steps, each labelled with the kind of work it needs.

Those labels matter, because the fixes sit in different places. Changing how assistants describe and recommend you is GEO work. Getting cited in Google’s own summaries is AI Overviews optimisation. Restructuring pages so one clear answer can be quoted is answer engine optimisation. You can act on the list yourself, hand it to your agency or ask me to quote.

The fee is quoted in GBP after a first call and agreed in writing before any work starts. If you re-check later, using the same prompts means each round compares like with like.