AI visibility audit: check mentions, citations and competitors.

Practical checklist

How to run an AI visibility audit

Use this checklist with BrandPresence or your own evidence log. The goal is a repeatable record that helps you decide what to investigate next.

1. 01

   Define the question set

   Include category, alternatives and buying questions for the same audience, language and market. Keep branded questions separate from unbranded discovery questions.

2. 02

   Record the measurement surface

   Save provider, model, prompt version, settings and date. Distinguish API responses from manually observed consumer interfaces.

3. 03

   Repeat and retain the answers

   Keep the answer and returned sources for each sample. Count failures separately so an unavailable provider is not recorded as a missing brand.

4. 04

   Separate mentions from citations

   Record whether the answer names your brand and whether it links to your own domain. Review competing brands and third-party source domains independently.

5. 05

   Inspect the relevant website pages

   Check whether important pages are crawlable, have a clear canonical URL, and explain the product with supportable facts. Connect a technical finding to an affected URL.

6. 06

   Choose a hypothesis and remeasure

   Prioritize a concrete gap supported by retained evidence. Keep the next measurement comparable and report changes without claiming that timing alone proves causality.

For Google Search, eligibility still depends on foundational SEO and helpful content. Google’s official guidance for generative AI search explains the requirements. An audit records evidence; it cannot promise inclusion in an AI answer.

AI visibility audit questions

What does an AI visibility audit include?

A useful audit records the buyer question, language and market, provider and model, measurement date, successful and failed samples, brand mentions, owned-domain citations, competing brands and returned sources. It checks the relevant website pages separately so a technical finding is not mistaken for the cause of an AI answer.

Can I check my AI visibility for free?

BrandPresence offers eligible domains a free snapshot with three inferred buyer questions and up to nine provider-API samples. No plan or payment card is required for the snapshot. Create a workspace to inspect the full retained answers. Recurring monitoring and higher usage are separate from this bounded check.

Does an OpenAI API result show what everyone sees in ChatGPT?

No. An API observation describes the requested provider, model and prompt at a particular time. A consumer interface can use different models, search tools, personalization and conversation context. BrandPresence labels its OpenAI, Perplexity and Google Gemini results as API measurements.

How often should I repeat an AI visibility audit?

Start with a baseline and a review cadence that fits the decision you need to make, such as a weekly review of important buyer questions. Keep the question, language, market and provider settings comparable, repeat the samples, and review again after a material website change. Report provider or model changes alongside the result.

What should I do if my brand is missing from AI answers?

First check successful sample coverage and repeat the question. Inspect which competitors and sources appear, then review the relevant page for crawlability, clear product facts and evidence supporting its claims. Choose a specific change supported by that evidence and remeasure. A missing mention alone does not identify a technical problem or guarantee that an edit will improve visibility.

Continue with ongoing LLM visibility monitoring, or review monitoring plans and usage limits.