23/09/2026
What should an AI visibility audit actually tell you?
Published · Updated
An AI visibility audit should help you decide what to improve. A screenshot showing a competitor in ChatGPT is a starting observation. It does not explain the cause or tell you which work will help.
Start with the buyer and the decision
Choose a service, market and customer type. Build questions around the choices they make: selecting a provider, comparing approaches, understanding costs and checking implementation requirements. Include branded and non-branded questions, and label them separately.
Ask for the test record
For each observation, keep the exact question, platform, date, interface, search mode and full answer. Save cited URLs. Repeat questions under comparable conditions because answers can vary. Mark an unavailable test as missing data rather than counting it as a failure to appear.
Separate a mention from a citation
A mention means the answer names your business. An own-site citation means it links to your domain. Neither establishes that someone visited or enquired. A useful report keeps mentions, citations, referral visits and qualified enquiries as separate measures.
Check the website as well
Inspect important pages for successful responses, crawl access, indexing directives, canonical URLs and helpful internal links. Then review whether the content explains the offer and supports its claims. Google states that existing SEO practices apply to its AI features; special AI markup is not required.
Expect a decision-ready action list
Each recommendation should name the affected page, the evidence, the proposed change and its priority. For example: clarify the implementation section on a service page because buyers need to know who prepares their data. That is more actionable than ‘increase authority’.
Use the findings responsibly
Do not treat one prompt result as a market-wide ranking. A repeated test is still a dated sample, and changes may have several causes. Agree which implementation tasks can be delivered and which outcomes must be observed over time.
Start with our buyer-question library and measurement method. For the platform’s own guidance, see Google’s AI features and your website.
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