How to run an AI visibility audit (step by step)

Search Genie team, HYVE Labs··6 min read

TL;DR

An AI visibility audit answers four questions: do engines know you, do they pick you, do they cite you, and can they even read you? Here’s the exact sequence — runnable by hand in an afternoon at pilot scale.

Step 1 — The identity check: do engines know you?

Ask each major assistant to describe your company, products and pricing, in every market language. You’re grading accuracy, not flattery: invented products, stale positioning and misread geographies are the failures — and they’re common enough that we found one about ourselves (the entity SEO guide tells that story and the fix).

Step 2 — The category check: do engines pick you?

Build a starter prompt set — ten real buying questions per market (construction method) — and run it on ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Record every brand named, in order. Two numbers fall out: your mention rate and your average answer rank; the full metric definitions are in the measurement framework.

Step 3 — The citation check: do engines cite you?

For your top keywords, note which trigger Google AI Overviews and whose domains get cited. Page-one rankings without citations mean you’re relevant but not quotable — the citation guide covers the passage surgery that fixes it.

Step 4 — The plumbing check: can engines read you?

Fetch your money pages with JavaScript disabled: is the content in the raw HTML? Check robots.txt against the AI crawler list (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends) for accidental blocks, and confirm structured data parses. A site that fails here fails everything upstream — the structure guide has the render rules.

Turning findings into a plan

  1. Wrong facts about you → entity fixes, this week.
  2. Unreadable pages → prerender/markup fixes, this sprint.
  3. Uncited page-one keywords → passage rewrites, this month.
  4. Lost prompt clusters → content briefs with a measurement attached, this quarter.
The pilot audit is deliberately manual — it builds intuition. But findings decay: models update, Overviews churn, competitors publish. The audit you run once is a snapshot; run on a schedule, it becomes a scoreboard — which is what Search Genie turns it into.

Or start with ours

We run exactly this sequence — real engine answers, human-reviewed — as the free AI-visibility audit. It’s the fastest way to get your baseline before deciding how deep to go.

Frequently asked questions

What does an AI visibility audit check?+

Four things: whether AI assistants mention and correctly describe your brand, how you score across a category prompt set versus competitors, whether AI Overviews on your keywords cite you, and whether your site is technically readable by AI crawlers at all.

How long does an AI visibility audit take?+

A useful manual pilot takes an afternoon: ten prompts, three engines, one spreadsheet. A full audit — complete prompt set, every engine, every market-language pair, plus crawlability and citation checks — is a few days by hand, or automated as a standing weekly measurement.

What should I do first after an audit?+

Fix what's wrong about you before chasing new visibility: incorrect brand descriptions and unreadable pages compound every other effort. Then take the cheapest contested ground the audit surfaced — usually a prompt cluster where no competitor consistently wins.

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