AI visibility audit: what AI answers say about your business, and how often

Who needs an AI visibility audit?

Any business whose customers might ask an AI tool before they ask a person: who does this job nearby, which option suits them, who they can trust with it. The audit shows whether the answers name you, and what they say when they do. What it covers depends on the business:

• An established local business: the local questions customers ask before they call, and the facts the answers repeat about your hours, areas and services.
• A multi-location or regional business: questions for each location, since an answer can name you in one town and a competitor down the road in the next.
• A national business: a larger set across services and buyer types, and more competitors to follow from one reading to the next.

For a first look on your own, start with the free check on this page.

What does the free AI visibility check ask?

You give us your business name, your website, your industry, your city and state, and an email address. We then put ten questions about your industry in your city to ChatGPT, with its web search on: questions such as “Who are the best family lawyers in Dallas, TX?” The questions never include your name, your website or your email, so nothing about you steers the answers.

The report arrives by email. It shows how many of the ten answers named your business, which businesses ChatGPT named, and which sites it cited. We ask ChatGPT through DataForSEO, a data provider, and one set of answers serves every check for the same industry and city for seven days. We’ll email you again later only if you tick the box that allows it.

What does the full audit add?

The free check asks one AI tool ten questions, once, and leaves your name out of them on purpose. The full audit is the first reading of our monthly GEO work, and it widens the check: a fixed set of buyer questions written around your services and areas, put to AI tools, then asked again on the schedule your proposal sets, so the rate can be followed over time.

It also reads each answer for more than a name. A business listed fifth in an answer is still named, and so is one mentioned with no link. The audit shows which sources the answers lean on for your questions and which facts they repeat about you, right or wrong.

Why is AI visibility scored as a rate?

Because the same question can get a different answer each time it’s asked, and a different one again from another tool. Google says even its own AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the answers and links they show will vary. One answer is one sample, so a single screenshot of a good or bad answer proves little.

A rate also needs its count beside it. With ten questions, each answer moves the rate by ten points, so a drop of twenty points can be just two answers changing between readings. Likewise, a question added later is best counted as its own series, so old and new figures aren’t mixed.

How can you check your AI visibility by hand?

You can run a rough version yourself:

1. Write ten questions your customers would ask, in their words, with your business name left out.
2. Open a fresh session in each tool, with its memory and saved history off where it has them, so earlier chats don’t steer the answer.
3. Ask each question and note the answer in a sheet: named or not, linked or not, which businesses came up, and anything wrong about you.
4. Add two questions about you by name, asking the tool who your business is and what it does, and check the facts it gives.
5. Repeat on the same day each month with the same questions, and compare the share of answers that name you.

Our guide on how to rank in ChatGPT covers what you can change once you have the figures.

What do AI visibility tools show, and what do they miss?

Each one sees part of the picture:

• Search Console’s Generative AI performance report: rolled out to every site by August 31, 2026, it counts how many times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. A site with few impressions may see no data.
• Ahrefs’ AI Responses Count: the links to your site in AI answers, and how many of your pages they cite, for each platform it covers, from AI Overviews and AI Mode to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Grok. An answer that names you without a link doesn’t appear in it.
• Paid AI visibility trackers: they can ask far more questions than anyone would by hand. Google’s guidance covers them too: no outside tool sees its internal ranking data, and any prediction a tool makes is its own and may not happen.

That’s why the question set reads every answer in full, for names as well as links. Our guide to GEO vs SEO puts these measures beside the ones SEO uses.

Where do AI answers get what they say about you?

From pages, and often from pages that aren’t yours. Google says its AI features can show what’s being said about products and services across the web, in blogs, videos and forum discussions, and the links under an answer show which pages it drew on. For a service business, the cited pages might be a directory listing with an old address, a “best of” list on a local site, a forum thread where a customer asked for advice, or your own page with last year’s prices.

The audit lists the sources the answers cite for your questions, so you can see which sites shape what buyers hear about you. Search Console’s Search generative AI control, on every site by August 31, 2026 and set to include by default, can exclude yours from Google’s AI features, and Google notes that content from other sites still appears there and may look similar to yours.

What happens when an AI answer gets your facts wrong?

The first step is finding where it comes from, before anything is changed. A wrong price, a closed location or an old phone number can usually be traced to a page the answer cites, and where that page sits decides the fix:

• A page on your site: we correct it in the monthly work and ask Google to index it again.
• A profile in your name, such as your Business Profile: the correction is made in the account itself, where the answer found the wrong fact.
• Another site, such as a directory or a news article: we show you the page and what it says, so its owner can be asked to correct it.

The next reading asks the same questions again, to see whether the answer changed.

How does AI visibility optimization work after the audit?

Each finding points to a piece of work:

• Answers that skip you: pages that answer your buyers’ questions plainly, which is the work of answer engine optimization.
• Crawlers that can’t reach or read your pages: the groundwork in AI SEO.
• Competitors named in your place: links earned from sites in your field.
• Wrong facts: fixed where they start, as above.

Google’s guide says content people find unique, compelling and useful will likely do more for a site’s presence in its AI search, over time, than any other step it suggests. So most of the work is pages worth citing, for the questions where answers skip you today.

What won’t an AI visibility audit tell you?

• A rank: an AI answer has no position one to hold. A business is named or it isn’t, linked or not, early in the answer or late.
• Every answer anyone sees: answers change with the person, the session and the day, and no question set covers them all.
• Next month’s answers: each AI company decides what its tool writes. We set targets for the rate, report against them and promise no mention.

How does the audit lead into the monthly work?

The audit is the first reading of our monthly GEO work, which runs as a layer on SEO. Month to month, that work fixes the site, from titles and descriptions to structured data, re-index requests and merging posts that overlap; builds out service and job pages with markup, articles each month and location pages where demand and local proof back them; earns links; and tracks AI-answer mentions. All year, the site is checked weekly and its links monthly, a one-page report arrives on the last day of each month with leads first, and each quarter we review the work with you. If we didn’t build your site, it comes into our own system first, with its old addresses redirected.

From our office in Valencia, we work with businesses across the US. Our GEO services page sets out the wider work, and our page on SEO pricing shows what agency price pages list for SEO. To see where AI answers put your business today, run the free check, or book a 15-minute call with Nicolas Perez or Noah Alvarez.