Open ChatGPT and ask it to recommend a business like yours. Then ask Perplexity. Then run the same question through Google and read the AI Overview at the top of the page.
If none of them name you, that is not a glitch. It is a ranking. The difference is that nobody sends you a report about it, and no tool in your current stack is measuring it.
An AI visibility audit tells you where you actually stand in the answers people are already getting, which competitors are being named instead of you, and what is causing it. It replaces a guess with evidence.
Why your existing reports cannot show you this
Search Console is the tool most businesses check, and it has a specific blind spot here. It does not break out AI Overviews as their own surface, and it reports nothing at all for ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude. Those assistants do not send Google your data.
So you can have a healthy Search Console report and still be completely absent from the answers your buyers are reading. The two are measuring different things. One counts blue links. The other decides whether you get mentioned at all.
This is the gap we cover in more depth in AEO vs. SEO. The short version: traditional SEO gets you into a list of results. Answer engine optimization gets you into the answer itself, and the two require different work.
What the audit actually checks
Four areas, run as one process.
1. Whether AI assistants name you at all
We run a fixed set of twenty prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode. The prompts are built around how people actually ask for a business like yours, not around your brand name, because searching your own name proves nothing. They cover the categories you sell, the problems you solve, and the comparison questions buyers ask before they shortlist anyone.
The set stays fixed between runs. That is the part that makes it a measurement rather than an anecdote: if we changed the questions each time, no result could be compared to the last one.
2. Who gets named instead
Every time an assistant recommends someone, we record who and, where the assistant shows its sources, which page it cited. This is usually the most uncomfortable part of the report and the most useful. Knowing that a competitor is being cited from a single blog post they wrote two years ago tells you exactly what the bar is.
3. Whether AI crawlers can reach you
Plenty of sites are invisible for a boring reason: their robots.txt blocks GPTBot, or their content is rendered in a way crawlers never see. We check crawler access directly, along with your structured data, your entity signals, and whether you have an llms.txt file and whether it is correct.
When this is the problem, it is the cheapest fix in the whole report.
4. Whether your content answers the question
Assistants quote sources that state things plainly. Pages built to rank in 2019, heavy on keywords and light on direct answers, tend not to get cited even when they rank well. We look at your top pages the way a model reads them and flag what is unquotable.
What you get
A written report, delivered in 5 business days, containing:
- Your citation rate across all twenty prompts and three platforms, as a number you can track
- The full list of competitors named instead of you, with the pages they were cited from
- A technical findings section covering crawler access, structured data and llms.txt
- A ranked list of what is blocking you, ordered by effort against likely impact
- A baseline you can re-measure against later
That last item is the one people underrate. Without a recorded starting point, there is no way to tell in three months whether anything you did actually worked.
What this will not do
It will not get you cited next week. AI assistants lean heavily on established, well referenced sources, and moving that takes months of real work, not a settings change.
It will not give you a guaranteed placement, because nobody can sell you one. There is no paid inclusion in ChatGPT results, and any agency offering it is describing something that does not exist.
It also will not produce identical results twice. These systems are probabilistic, and the same prompt can return slightly different answers on different days. That is exactly why we use twenty prompts across three platforms rather than one lucky query, and why we record the raw responses rather than only the summary.
We would rather tell you that up front than have you discover it after paying for something.
Who this is worth it for
This is worth doing if buyers research you before they contact you, if your competitors are visible in AI answers and you are not, or if you are about to invest in content and want to know where you are starting from.
It is not worth doing if your website is not indexed yet, or if you have no content to speak of. In those cases the audit would only tell you what you already know, and the money is better spent on the underlying problem first.
Try the free version first
If you want a sense of your technical readiness before committing to anything, our free website audit tool runs over 40 automated checks in about a minute, including AI search readiness, structured data, accessibility and speed. No signup, no sales call.
The free tool answers whether your site is technically ready to be cited. It cannot answer whether you are actually being cited, because that requires running real prompts and reading real answers. That is the part we do by hand.
You can also do a rough version yourself. We wrote a walkthrough on how to check if ChatGPT recommends your business, and it costs nothing but an afternoon. If that turns up something worrying, the full audit is the structured version of the same idea.
How it works
You tell us what you sell and who you compete with. We run the prompt set, record every response, check the technical side, and write it up. You get the report in 5 business days, and a call to walk through it if you want one.
Pricing depends on how many categories and competitors you need covered, so request a quote and we will tell you what it costs before you commit to anything. If the audit is not the right thing for you, we will say so.
Ongoing work after the audit is handled under AI search readiness and AEO. The audit stands alone though, and plenty of people take the report and act on it themselves. That is a completely reasonable thing to do.