The AI Search Visibility Audit Framework

It may seem as though AI is cropping up everywhere. For businesses in particular, though, AI has completely changed the game. Suddenly, AI can produce detailed blog briefs, automate workflows, and conduct predictive analytics. However, this isn’t the only impact AI is having on companies.

AI has altered the online space in which businesses are competing. They are no longer just looking to improve their ranking positions and get clicks. They are now competing to appear in the AI Overview’s answers, as well as in Chatbots like ChatGPT and AI assistants like Gemini. The excitement surrounding this can easily lead many brands and agencies to forget something crucial: measuring!

Measuring visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, and other AI search platforms is absolutely critical if you want to stand a chance of leading the race for digital attention and authority. Our guide will walk you through conducting an AI search visibility audit, covering prompts, citationsA citation is a mention of your company, product, or service in an online publication. Citations increase the ranking of your site on search engines, competitor presence, and more, turning that buzzword into visible results. Let’s jump into it.

What Is an AI Search Visibility Audit?

An AI search visibility audit is a process that analyses whether AI systems have mentioned your brand and how often. This covers all AI systems, including ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini. It differs significantly from traditional search results audits, which are all about the position you rank. Rather than assessing a position, keywords, backlinks, and organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page., it looks at whether AI systems have recommended your products or services, cited your content, accurately described your business, and associated your brand with the right topics and expertise.

As part of an AI search audit, you won’t just be looking at how often you’ve been cited or mentioned. The audit also uncovers how you’ve fared compared to your competitors, how accurate the AI response is to real-life queries (which mention your brand or cite you), what sources the AI is relying upon for its answers if not you, and whether you have enough expertise to be recognised. Gathering these metrics allows you to put together a campaign that will continue to increase your visibility in all AI systems or build the foundations from which to grow.

Why Brands Need to Measure AI Search Visibility

Before AI, brands dedicated all their time, resources, and energy to securing themselves a position in the top 10 blue linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. on Google’s first results page. AI introduced a new layer to this. Users no longer had to rifle through website after website to find the answer they were seeking. Instead, AI generated a real-time answer for them, drawing on information real brands had included on their websites. The immediacy and accuracy they have provided in such a short time have made this way of searching the preferred method for many, who welcome this change to search with open arms.

The result for businesses? If your brand isn’t cited, you reduce your chances of being visited or even of getting brand exposure.

Say a user uses ChatGPT to ask, “What are the best sustainable retailers?” and your name doesn’t appear here, even if they see your name show up on Google results, they might still go to a competitor whose name appears in the generated answer. Why? They associate that with more credibility.

It is important to note that this doesn’t lessen the importance of traditional search. We still strongly advocate for SEO and improving rankings on Google, Bing, and other major search engines. If you want to know more, check out this article produced by Bing, which details guidance on how search results are delivered. However, running a ChatGPT visibility audit will determine whether your brand appears frequently, ensuring you aren’t missing out on opportunities like this that increase your credibility and exposure.

The reasons an audit is necessary extend beyond this. AI-referred traffic has seen a massive spike of late. Brands that measure this visibility can see just how much traffic they generate from AI alone. Your competitors who are earning organic search traffic may also be benefiting from this AI-referred traffic. So, even if you are technically gaining more organic traffic every month than they are, if they are earning AI traffic and you are not, they are ultimately coming out on top. You need to know their visibility to understand the volume of traffic they might be experiencing, so you can get a suitable benchmark.

How to Run an AI Search Visibility Audit

You know the what and the why, the only thing left to explore is the how. How do you run an AI SEO audit? The best way forward is to use our GEO services. We offer visibility audits as standard, but we understand that not everyone is ready for that kind of investment without knowing a bit more about how the process works, so let’s break it down into manageable steps. For the purpose of this blog, we will use a LLM engine, like ChatGPT, as an example for the following steps, but you will also need to do the same with AI Overviews:

Step 1: Select Your Reporting Tool

You don’t need to worry about any manual work if you select the right tool. The go-to SEO reporting tool for many agencies and brands is our very own: Click Insights. With our LLM Visibility Tracker, agencies can run a GEO audit and assess their visibility on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and more.

You can use our AI Overviews Tracker to track your keywords, search intent, your daily position changes, and historical data.

Step 2: Pick Your Prompts

Upon opening Click Insights, you will need to enter a keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. to generate prompts. For example:

Type in the keyword: Sustainable retailer

Click Generate.

We will provide 5 prompts we recommend you monitor, as you could see great results by pursuing them. This might be:

1. Best sustainable online retailers
2. What retailers are better than ultra-fast fashion brands?
3. Top ethical retailers for homeware
4. Which retailers are truly sustainable?
5. What sustainable brands are trending?

We allow you to edit these as you see fit. All you need to do is then click save. You can easily view all these saved prompts in one place. Here, you’ll notice that it provides a quick overview of the best-performing LLM engine, the average visibility score, and the average ranking.

Researching prompt visibility is essential. This is what real-life users are searching for on ChatGPT and others. This is how people are discovering brands, including yours.

Step 3: Testing Your Prompts

Step 3 will have you test these prompts to see whether your brand appears for any of them, how often, where it ranks within the recommendations, which competitors appear alongside you, and which AI system gives you the strongest visibility.

What Prompts Should Agencies Test First?

You need to begin with the prompts considered most valuable in your niche. Our recommendation is to start with general discovery prompts such as:

1. Best sustainable retailer
2. What retailers are genuinely eco-friendly?
3. Most sustainable fashion retailers

These can be very revealing. Then, you might move on to service-specific prompts such as:

1. Who specialises in sustainable sportswear?
2. What is the best sustainable sportswear apparel?

Or you may look into comparison:

1. Best sustainable alternative to Amazon
2. Eco-friendly alternative to fast fashion

Step 4: Review Your Results

Check over how visible your competitors are, which websites are cited, how dominant your brand is, and which prompts you have won or lost to competitors. At this point, you’ll be presented with a table detailing all of this.

Conducting an AI Search Audit Manually

If you want to try this all manually, make sure to do it as follows:

1. Choose 10 prompts your target customers might ask.
2. Search those prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews where available.
3. Record whether your brand appears.
4. Record which competitors appear.
5. Record which websites are cited or referenced.
6. Check whether your brand is described correctly.
7. Identify missing content or weak areas.
8. Decide what content, technical SEO, or authority work is needed next.

What Should You Record During An AI Search Visibility Audit?

You must note down every prompt you test, as the slightest word change can completely change the intent. Also, note the type of prompt used each time; you may see the strongest results with informational prompts rather than comparison prompts. For others, they might have weak success with transactional but strong results with local.

Then, record what AI platforms you have tested and how frequently your brand name came up on each in comparison to competitors. As an example, you might note the following:

• Brand name appeared 56% in the tested prompts
• Competitor appears 67%

Make sure to also record the average position and ranking, in other words, where your brand appears. Is it mentioned first? Perhaps it has just been pipped to the post and come second. It could be that it is much further within the answer. Other notable things to record include:

• How the AI system has described you – is it accurate, trusted, affordable, beginner-friendly?
• How inaccurately the AI has described you – is there anything negative? Perhaps they’ve used outdated information or messaging.
• What the AI Systems have connected your brand with – e.g., as a sustainable sportswear fashion retailer, have they concluded you are both sustainable and a sportswear retailer?
• Citation sources – Has your website been cited, or has your competitor? Either way, make sure to record it down, noting the website to see which types of publications are influencing these recommendations. For example, this might be on YouTube, Reddit, or general news sites.
• What AI system is actually giving you visibility – is it ChatGPT or Gemeni? You might find that you get the best results with AI Overviews while your competitors dominate with ChatGPT.

How to Record Brand Mentions, Competitors, and Cited Sources

If you are doing the audit manually, you may reach step 3 and question how to record brand mentions, competitors, and cited sources. The best way to do this is with a simple spreadsheet that lets you easily compare results.

How Often Should You Repeat an AI Search Audit?

AI citation tracking should be completed at least every 1-3 months. For most competitive industries, a monthly audit is highly recommended, as the space can change in an instant if you aren’t monitoring it. Smaller businesses might be able to lengthen the gap between audits, which can be useful in many ways, as it allows you or us to spot visibility trends, competitor growth, and improvements in authority. For those who want to do monthly audits, using the Click Insights tool is the best option.

What to Do After the Audit

Once you’ve completed your audit, whether using Click Insights or manually yourself, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin improving your visibility. We first recommend taking a few extra minutes to read our SearchGPT Ranking Factors blog. Knowing more about how SearchGPT works can help you better understand how you will be discovered, recommended, and remain visible in AI Search.

Once you’re a bit more familiar with these ranking factors, you will want to look at how you can nail your entity optimisation. AI systems want to understand who you are, what you do, what topics you are an expert in, how you compare to competitors, and the trust associated with you. Entity optimisation helps strengthen these. Such optimisation tactics include:

• Content creation
• Digital PR
• Structured data (you can use our handy Schema Guide for more information)
• Consistency
• Topical authority
• Author profiles
• Reputation management

We also suggest you look into content retrievability. Investigate how easy it is to find, understand, and subsequently reference your content. If your content isn’t very easy to find, make changes such as introducing clear page structures, descriptive headings, tables, and concise answers.

The one mistake many brands make is assuming that their SEO efforts will improve their AI visibility. This isn’t the case. Ensure you are conducting the right AI SEO campaigns. If you aren’t sure, learn more here on our AI SEO service page or get in touch with a member of our team today.