AI Visibility Audit
An AI visibility audit shows you exactly which buying questions ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews answer without mentioning your brand, which competitors they name instead, and what that gap costs you every month. You may also see it called an AI search audit or an AEO audit. I run the first version for free, before we ever get on a call.
8 minutes of analysis. A 20-minute walkthrough. No pitch.
What is an AI visibility audit?
An AI visibility audit is a structured assessment of how a brand appears in AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. It measures whether the brand is present for its revenue-driving queries, whether AI describes it accurately, which competitors are cited instead, whether the site is technically retrievable by AI crawlers, and what the visibility gap costs in traffic value. It differs from an SEO audit, which measures rankings. A brand can hold position 1 in Google and still be absent from the AI answer above it.
What the free audit measures
Your SEO report tells you where you rank. It doesn’t tell you whether an AI engine mentions your brand when your buyer asks what to purchase, who to hire, or which product is best. That answer happens before the click, and most brands have no idea where they stand. The audit measures three things:
- Citation presence: the 5 highest-intent queries your buyers actually use, run fresh in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, recording whether your brand appears in the answer.
- Competitor citation share: the same 5 queries, scored for which competitors get named, on which questions, and how consistently.
- Traffic value lost: your last 12 months of organic decline priced at the Google Ads market rate for that traffic, pulled from Ahrefs, so the gap has a dollar figure instead of a feeling.
What you walk away with
- Your monthly loss, in dollars: one number that makes the problem concrete.
- Named competitors: who took the visibility, and on which specific queries.
- Your AI visibility score: how many of your 5 buyer queries mention you today, from 0 of 5 to 5 of 5.
- The three highest-impact fixes: ranked by recoverable revenue, specific enough to hand to any implementer.
You receive the written summary within 24 hours of the call. It’s yours to keep and act on whether we ever work together or not.
What a typical audit finds
Real numbers from recent audits. Company names are anonymized.
| Business type | Monthly traffic value lost | AI visibility score | Primary cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-commerce brand, $4M revenue | $18,400/month | 0 of 5 queries | Competitor displaced top 12 category keywords in 8 months |
| B2B SaaS, $2.8M ARR | $11,200/month | 1 of 5 queries | Google AI Overview answering their primary buying query without citing them |
| Multi-location service, 8 locations | $7,600/month | 0 of 5 queries | Missing LocalBusiness schema across all location pages |
The common thread: every one of these businesses had stable or improving Google rankings. The loss wasn’t a ranking problem. It was AI-intercepted queries that never reached Google, won by competitors who had built the infrastructure to get cited.
The 6-category audit framework
The full audit scores six categories, weighted into a 0-100 visibility score. The methodology is published here on purpose: you can run the first pass yourself, and the findings mean more when you can see how they were produced.
- Answer presence (25%). Your revenue-driving queries run across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Are you in the answer? Real testing needs 20+ representative prompts across the buying journey, not three vanity checks.
- Competitive displacement (20%). When you’re absent, who took your slot? The same three or four competitors usually recur, and their citation sources tell you exactly what to build.
- Accuracy and sentiment (15%). What AI says about you when it does mention you. Wrong pricing, dead products and misattributed features are more common than most brands expect, and they compound silently.
- Technical retrievability (15%). Whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot can crawl you at all, whether your schema parses, and whether your money pages render for machines. Blocked bots and broken structured data are instant disqualifiers.
- Citation source coverage (15%). AI engines lean heavily on third-party sources: review platforms, comparison pages, industry publications. If your presence lives only on your own domain, you’re invisible to the retrieval layer that matters most.
- Revenue exposure (10%). The traffic value of every query where you’re absent, in dollars. This is the number that turns an audit from interesting into actionable.
Run a first pass yourself, free
Four of the six categories can be spot-checked with free tools I built for this audit:
- AI Citation Checker: answer presence and competitor displacement for one query at a time.
- Brand Hallucination Auditor: accuracy, scored against your real facts.
- AI Overview and SERP Feature Checker: which queries trigger an AI Overview and which sources Google cites in it.
- AI Overviews Revenue Leak Diagnostic: revenue exposure, from your own Search Console data.
Free audit vs. paid deep-dive
The free version (8 minutes). The 5-query visibility test, your top competitor displacements, the headline revenue-leak number, and your three highest-impact fixes, walked through on a 20-minute call.
The paid deep-dive ($2,500). The full 20+ prompt battery run across every engine, complete competitive citation mapping, all six framework categories scored, page-by-page technical findings, and a prioritized 90-day repair plan you can execute in-house or hand to me. Book a call to start the deep-dive.
Need the Shopify technical side instead? The Shopify SEO Audit ($1,500) covers crawl, indexation, schema, collections, and speed across your whole store, with a lighter 5-query AI check. Pick that one if your problem is Google; pick the deep-dive if your problem is AI answers.
What happens after. A readout call. No pitch. The findings either make the case or they don’t.
How it works
- Book the call below. The calendar opens a 20-minute slot. All I need is your domain and your name. No intake form, no questionnaire.
- I run the audit before we speak. Ahrefs data, competitor analysis and the 5-query AI visibility test, done ahead of time. It takes me 8 minutes with the infrastructure I’ve built.
- We spend 20 minutes on your findings. I walk you through the numbers. You ask questions. If there’s nothing actionable in your data, I tell you that plainly.
- You decide what to do with it. Some people book a second call about a retainer. Some implement the fixes internally. Either way, the findings are yours.
Who this audit is for
- E-commerce and Shopify brands with $1M+ revenue whose organic traffic has declined or plateaued in the last 6 months
- B2B SaaS companies with $500K+ ARR whose inbound pipeline slowed while rankings held
- Multi-location service businesses watching one national competitor dominate AI answers in their category
If your site gets under 500 organic visits a month or has less than 6 months of Ahrefs history, the audit will have limited data to work with. Book anyway and I’ll tell you upfront if that’s the case, and what to do first instead.
Or email directly: [email protected]
Common questions
Is this actually free?
Yes. I run the audit at my own cost before the call. There’s no catch and no upsell built into the 20 minutes. If there’s a fit for a retainer afterward, I’ll say so plainly. If there isn’t, I’ll say that too.
What does an AI visibility audit include?
At minimum: testing your buyer queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, recording who gets cited, checking what AI says about your brand, confirming AI crawlers can access your site, and putting a dollar figure on the gap. The free version covers 5 queries. The paid deep-dive covers 20+ queries and all six categories above.
How is this different from a regular SEO audit?
A standard SEO audit measures rankings, crawl errors and page health. An AI visibility audit measures whether AI engines cite your brand when buyers ask purchase questions, and prices the gap in dollars. Rankings can look perfect while your brand is absent from every AI answer that matters. That absence is what this audit finds.
Is this the same as an AI search audit, AEO audit or GEO audit?
Functionally, yes. AI search audit, AEO audit and GEO audit all describe the same assessment from different angles. The 6-category framework above covers all of them.
How much does an AI visibility audit cost?
Free automated versions exist, including mine. Professional deep-dives typically run $1,500 to $5,000 depending on prompt coverage and competitive scope. Mine is $2,500 flat. If you run a Shopify store and mainly need the technical fixes, the Shopify SEO Audit is $1,500.
What do you need from me before the call?
Just your domain. The buyer queries, competitor data and traffic analysis all come from my side. If you already know the 5 questions your buyers ask most, bring them and I’ll test those instead.
What happens after the audit?
You get the written summary within 24 hours. If you want the gaps fixed, retainers start at $2,000/month and every engagement is direct work with me. See the AEO services page for deliverables and pricing, or read what AEO is if the concept is new to you.