How to Run an AI Visibility Audit (A Free 30-Minute Method)

An AI visibility audit tells you whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews mention your business when someone asks them a buying question in your category. You can run a credible one yourself in about thirty minutes with nothing but a browser. Here is the exact method we use before quoting anyone for AI visibility work — run it first, so you can judge any proposal you're given.

Step 1: Build your prompt set (10 minutes)

Write 15–20 prompts a real buyer would type. Cover four intent types, and phrase them as questions, not keywords — people talk to AI in sentences.

Intent type	Example prompt
Category discovery	"Who are the best web development companies in Nashik?"
Problem-led	"My website is slow and I'm losing leads — who in Pune can fix it?"
Comparison	"Compare the top HRMS providers in Pune for a 200-person company"
Brand-direct	"What does GK Digital do and who are they good for?"

Include the questions with commercial value, not the flattering ones. If "best X in Y city" is how your customers actually ask, that prompt goes in even if you already suspect you won't appear.

Step 2: Run every prompt across five surfaces

Run each prompt in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Google search (watching the AI Overview). Use a logged-out or temporary chat where possible — personalised history will flatter you with results a stranger would never see. Run each prompt twice; these systems are non-deterministic and a single run is not evidence.

Step 3: Score what comes back

For each prompt and each platform, record one of five outcomes:

• Cited — you're named and linked as a source. The best outcome.
• Mentioned — named in the answer but not linked.
• Absent — not there at all.
• Wrong — mentioned with incorrect facts: wrong city, wrong services, outdated pricing, a phone number you haven't used in three years.
• Confused — the AI has merged you with a similarly named company.

Put it in a simple grid: prompts down the side, platforms across the top. Also log who did appear instead of you, and which sources the AI cited. That competitor list is the single most useful output of the whole exercise.

Step 4: Read the citations, not just the answers

This is the step most people skip and it's where the actual strategy comes from. Perplexity and AI Overviews show their sources; ask ChatGPT and Gemini to list theirs. You will almost always find the same handful of source types doing the work:

• Directory and listing sites (Google Business Profile, Justdial, Sulekha, Clutch, industry directories)
• Comparison and "top 10" listicles published by third parties
• Community discussion — Reddit, Quora, forums
• News, press coverage and trade publications
• The company's own site — usually a specific, well-structured page, not the homepage

If your competitors are being pulled from five listicles you don't appear in, your problem is not your website. It's your presence in the sources AI reads.

Step 5: Diagnose the failure mode

Your grid will point to one of four distinct problems, and each has a different fix.

Symptom	Root cause	Fix
Absent everywhere, competitors cited from third-party lists	No off-site authority	Directory presence, listicle inclusion, PR, reviews
Present in Perplexity, absent in ChatGPT	Crawl and index gaps on specific platforms	Check robots.txt for AI crawlers, add llms.txt, fix rendering
Mentioned with wrong facts	Inconsistent entity data across the web	Fix NAP consistency, schema markup, Google Business Profile
Confused with another company	Weak entity definition	Organization schema, sameAs links, a clear About page, distinct positioning

Step 6: The technical checks (5 minutes)

• Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Are you blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended or CCBot? Many sites block them by accident via a security plugin or CDN rule.
• Does yoursite.com/llms.txt exist? It's a plain-text summary of your site for language models — cheap to add, and increasingly read.
• View source on a key page. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, some AI crawlers will see an empty page.
• Do you have valid Organization, LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage schema? Test it in Google's Rich Results Test.
• Is your Google Business Profile complete, with categories, services, hours and recent reviews?

Step 7: Set a baseline and re-run monthly

Compute a simple visibility score: (cited × 2 + mentioned) ÷ (prompts × platforms × 2) × 100. It doesn't matter that the formula is crude — what matters is that it's consistent. Re-run the identical prompt set monthly and track the trend. Anyone selling you AI visibility services who cannot show you movement on a baseline like this is selling you activity, not results.

What to do with the results

Most businesses find the same thing: technically fine, entirely absent. The fix is rarely on-page tweaks — it's building the off-site sources AI actually reads, structuring your content to answer questions directly, and defining your brand as an unambiguous entity. That's the work behind answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization.

If you'd rather not run this yourself, GK Digital does exactly this audit across all five surfaces, with the competitor and citation-source analysis included. See AI visibility optimization or LLM optimization for how we act on the findings.