AI visibility audit: 6-step checklist
Check in 6 steps whether AI systems can find, read and cite your website — from robots.txt to repeatable prompt measurement.
Key takeaways
What an AI visibility audit is and when to run one
It is a diagnosis of whether answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) can find, read and cite your website — and whether they actually do. It makes sense when clients say "I found you via ChatGPT" (or precisely never say it), when competitors appear in AI answers and you do not, or when you enter a market and want a baseline.
The audit result is a state and a gap list — not a promise of rankings or citations.
Check 1 — AI crawler access (robots.txt and bot protection)
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check the entries for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. Also check whether your firewall or CDN blocks AI bots globally — a frequent silent visibility killer.
One distinction matters: OAI-SearchBot = visibility in ChatGPT search; GPTBot = consent to model training, a separate business decision.
Check 2 — content in raw HTML
Ctrl+U on a key page: are your offer, answers and FAQ visible as text? If the page is an "empty div + JavaScript", it does not exist for part of the AI crawlers. We solved this on our own site with prerendering — full answers sit in clean HTML before any script runs.
Check 3 — do pages answer questions
AI cites answer passages. Walk through your 5 most important pages and check: can you point to the question the page answers? Does the answer come in the first sentences, or only after a wall of intro? A rich "about us" page loses to a "concrete question → concrete answer" page.
Check 4 — structured data without theatre
Schema should describe what is visible on the page: the organisation, the service, FAQ next to a real FAQ section. There is no special "schema for AI" — do not add markup on spec, it will not speed up citations and can hurt the credibility of your data.
Check 5 — external sources: where AI takes recommendations from
From our measurement (June 2026, Perplexity, three buying-intent prompts): the AI recommended competitors present in industry directories, and one of the cited sources was the directory itself. So check: is your company in the directories relevant to your industry? Does it have mentions beyond its own domain? Missing external signals are the most common reason for invisibility despite a good website.
Check 6 — prompt measurement (the most important one)
Write 3-5 prompts your ideal client would ask. Logged out, ask them in Perplexity and ChatGPT and note: date, prompt, whether your domain is cited and who gets cited instead of you. That is your baseline.
Record the result even when the brand is never mentioned. A zero point is useful for comparison after 2-4 weeks; it is not a result to publish.
How much you can do yourself — and when to get an expert audit
You can do checks 1, 2 and 6 yourself in half an hour. Checks 3-5 require judging content, schema and the mention profile — self-assessment inflates easily there.
A free first step: our automated AI visibility check. Our SEO and AI visibility service covers the full audit with a prioritised fix list — no ranking promises, with a measurable before/after state.
FAQ
Can I "buy" visibility in ChatGPT?
No. You can remove blockers and build signals; citations arrive (or not) over weeks, and the trend decides.
Are Google AI Overviews the same as ChatGPT?
No — they are separate systems with separate crawlers, which is why the audit checks access for each bot individually.
How often should I repeat the measurement?
The same prompts every 2-4 weeks; a one-off result says little.