Run an AI visibility audit in 30 minutes
A fast, repeatable audit to see how AI engines represent your brand — and the three fixes that move the needle first. No tooling required to start.
A full AI-visibility program takes months, but a useful audit takes thirty minutes. The goal is not completeness — it is to find the few gaps that are costing you citations right now. Work in three passes and write down what you find.
Pass 1 — Can they even reach you? (10 min)
- Check robots.txt for accidental blocks of GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot.
- Confirm your sitemap loads and lists your important pages with honest lastmod dates.
- Spot-check a key page for Article/FAQ/Organization JSON-LD that validates.
- Verify your home page states plainly what your company is — the entity definition.
Pass 2 — How do they describe you? (10 min)
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot and ask the questions your buyers ask: "best tools for X," "alternatives to Y," "how do I do Z." Note whether you are mentioned, whether the description is accurate and current, and which sources the engine cites. Stale or wrong framing is as much a problem as being absent.
Pass 3 — Who is winning instead? (10 min)
For the prompts where you are missing, record who is cited. Look at those sources: are they winning on schema, on freshness, on third-party corroboration, or simply on being crawlable where you are blocked? The pattern usually points straight at your first fix.
Ship three fixes this week
- Unblock any answer bot you are accidentally excluding, and resubmit your sitemap.
- Add or repair structured data on your highest-intent pages.
- Refresh the one cornerstone page competitors are being cited over, then push it via IndexNow.
Re-run the same prompts in two weeks. Because the answer surface is dynamic, you are looking for a trend across repeated checks, not a single snapshot — which is exactly what continuous monitoring automates.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need a tool to start?
- No. The first audit can be done with robots.txt, your sitemap, a schema validator and the chat engines themselves. Tooling helps you do it continuously and at scale.
- How often should I audit?
- Do a quick pass monthly and monitor continuously for high-value prompts. The AI answer surface changes constantly, so one-off audits go stale fast.
- What is the single most common gap?
- Accidentally blocking an answer bot, followed closely by missing or invalid structured data on the pages that matter most.