Answer
How to audit your AI search visibility
Audit it the way buyers experience it: ask the AI engines the questions your buyers ask, then record whether you appear, are cited, are described accurately, and how you are characterized. Six steps below.
The six steps
- 1
List the real buyer prompts
Write down the questions a buyer actually asks when looking for what you sell, in their words, including local and commercial-intent phrasings. These, not your keywords, are what you test.
- 2
Ask each AI engine
Put those prompts to ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot. Use a clean session so personalization does not skew the result, and run each prompt more than once because answers vary.
- 3
Record presence, citation, and accuracy
For each prompt and engine, note whether your business appears, whether it is cited or linked, whether the description is accurate, and the sentiment of the mention. Note which competitors appear instead.
- 4
Check your entity consistency
Confirm your business name, services, locations, and key facts are identical across your site, Google Business Profile, directories, review sites, and industry profiles. Inconsistency makes engines hedge.
- 5
Map the sources the engines cite
Identify which directories, review sites, publications, and profiles the engines pull from in your category, and where you are missing or inaccurate in them.
- 6
Track it over time
Re-run the same prompts on a schedule (monthly works) and track presence, citation, and accuracy as trends, not one-off snapshots. Treat AI visibility as a metric, not a rank.
What to do with the results
The audit usually shows the same pattern: low presence, inconsistent description, and thin third-party corroboration. Fix the entity data first, then build answer-ready content for the prompts where you are absent, then earn accurate mentions in the sources the engines already cite. For how engines weigh those signals, see how AI engines choose sources; for how Akii scores it, see the methodology.
Frequently asked questions
How do I audit my AI search visibility?
List the prompts your buyers actually ask, put them to ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, and record for each whether you appear, are cited, are described accurately, and the sentiment. Then fix entity consistency, map the sources the engines cite, and track the same prompts over time.
Why not just check my Google ranking?
Because the AI answer can decide before anyone clicks a link, and standard analytics attribute the eventual visit to branded or direct traffic. Ranking tells you about the links page; an AI visibility audit tells you about the answer that shapes the shortlist.
How often should I run the audit?
Monthly is a reasonable cadence for most businesses. AI answers shift, so a single check is a snapshot; the value is in the trend across presence, citation, and accuracy.
Can I automate this?
Yes. A free Akii AI Visibility Score runs the probe across engines and scores presence, accuracy, sentiment, and recommendation likelihood, with the full method published so you can see exactly what it measures.
Run the audit automatically
A free Akii AI Visibility Score does the multi-engine probe for you and scores the result.
Written and reviewed by Josef Holm, Founder & CEO of Akii