AI Search Visibility Audit

AI search visibility audit

Classic SEO asks "do we rank for this keyword". AI answer engines do not rank. They retrieve a handful of sources and synthesize one answer. A site can sit at the top of page one and never be quoted. This skill audits the second thing.

Run the four phases in order. Do not skip Phase 1: without a citation baseline everything after it is speculation.

Scope and limits

• Read only publicly accessible URLs and robots.txt.
• Respect the target site's robots.txt and terms of service. Do not attempt to bypass authentication, paywalls, rate limits, or access controls.
• If a page requires a login, stop and say the audit covers public pages only.
• Audit sites the user is responsible for, or public competitors for comparison. Do not use this to probe a site the user has no relationship with.

Before you start

Collect from the user, asking only for what is missing:

• The domain to audit.
• The category the brand wants to be recommended in, in the user's own words (for example "expense management software for startups").
• Two or three named competitors. If the user does not know, derive them in Phase 1 and confirm before continuing.

Phase 1 - Citation baseline

Build 10 to 15 prompts a real buyer would type. Cover all four intents. A set that is all category queries will overstate visibility.

For each prompt, search the web and record:

1. Whether the brand is named at all.
2. Whether it is cited with a link, or merely mentioned in prose.
3. Which domain the citation points to - the brand's own site, or a third party such as a review site, a forum thread, or a roundup article.
4. Which competitors appear, and in what order.

Report a table plus three numbers: mention rate, cited-with-link rate, and share of voice against the named competitors.

State plainly that this is one sample, from one engine, at one point in time. Results vary between engines and between runs. Do not present a single run as a trend. Do not call any percentage "the" visibility score.

Phase 2 - Can AI crawlers reach the site

Fetch https://<domain>/robots.txt. Blocking the wrong agent is the single most common cause of total absence from AI answers, and it is usually accidental, inherited from a bot-blocking template.

Check at minimum these agents:

Crawler names change. Before concluding, check each operator's own published crawler documentation for agents added or renamed since this list was written, and audit those too. Say which list you actually used.

Two traps worth stating explicitly, because teams get both wrong:

• Blocking GPTBot does not remove a site from ChatGPT Search. OAI-SearchBot is the agent that governs citations. Teams routinely block the training crawler and assume they have opted out of the search surface, or block the search crawler while trying to opt out of training.
• Google-Extended does not control AI Overviews. AI Overviews are built on the normal Googlebot index, so blocking Google-Extended will not take a site out of them, and allowing it will not put a site into them.

Then check reachability. Fetch the homepage and two important pages. Report:

• The status code and any redirect chain.
• Whether the primary content is present in the raw HTML, or only after JavaScript executes. Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so content that only appears after hydration is invisible to them. This is a frequent cause of a site that looks fine in a browser and is empty to a retriever.
• Whether a sitemap is declared and reachable.
• Whether /llms.txt exists. Treat it as an emerging convention with uneven adoption and no confirmed consumer, not as a ranking factor.

Phase 3 - Is the content citable

Pick the three pages the user most wants cited. For each, judge the properties that actually get a passage lifted into an answer:

• Self-contained passages. A retriever pulls a chunk, not a page. Can any 200 to 300 word block be quoted with no surrounding context and still make sense?
• A direct answer near the top. Pages that open with positioning copy get skipped. The answer should appear in the first paragraph under the heading.
• Question-shaped headings. Headings phrased as the question a user actually asks match retrieval far better than clever headings.
• Specifics. Numbers, dates, named limits, and prices are quotable. "Industry-leading performance" is not.
• First-hand evidence. Original data, benchmarks, and named methodology survive summarization. Restated common knowledge does not.
• Freshness signals. A visible last-updated date, and content that is actually current.
• Structured data. Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article. Verify it parses. Markup that renders is not necessarily markup that validates.

Quote the weakest passage you found and rewrite it as a demonstration. One concrete before-and-after teaches more than a checklist.