What an AI visibility audit covers, step by step

An AI visibility audit checks whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can find your business, understand what you sell and name you when a buyer asks. It covers five areas in order: the prompts buyers type, your offers, your feeds and listings, your entity and schema layer, and your content and outside mentions. You can run a rough version of each this week with a spreadsheet and an hour per step.

The effort is worth it because buyers are already asking. Locus found that 45% of US online shoppers use an AI tool somewhere in the purchase journey (Q2 2026), and Adobe measured AI traffic to US retailers converting 42% better than non-AI traffic in Q1 2026. SparkToro and Similarweb put the share of US Google searches that end without a click at 68%.

Step 1: Set the prompt panel

Write 25 questions a buyer would type before choosing a business like yours. Mix the types: category questions ("best waterproof hiking jackets under $200"), comparisons, problem questions, local questions and a few that use your brand name.

Run every prompt in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Log each result as named, cited with a link, or absent. That sheet is your baseline, and every later fix gets judged against it. A 25-prompt panel is also the unit our 90-day guarantee counts.

Step 2: Score your offers

An offer is anything a buyer can pick: a product, a plan, a service, a location. For each of your top ten by revenue, check four things on the page. Does it state a price or a price range? Who is it for? What is included? What is the policy on returns, cancellation or service area?

An engine cannot recommend what it cannot describe in a sentence. Mark each offer pass or fail on the four checks. The fixes are mostly copy edits, and they are the cheapest wins in the whole audit.

Step 3: Check feeds and listings

For a store, open your catalog export and count the blanks. OpenAI's product feed spec has 9 required fields. Shopify's catalog needs a standard category, an image for every variant, a price above zero and full policies. Missing fields can keep a product out of a shopping answer. The ecommerce page covers how we handle catalogs.

For a business with locations, the check is the listings. Gemini grounds local answers on Google Maps, while ChatGPT and Perplexity use Bing Places and Yelp. Confirm that hours, categories, phone numbers and service descriptions match across all three. The SOCi Local Visibility Index 2026 found that ChatGPT recommends 1.2% of multi-location businesses, Gemini 11% and Perplexity 7.4%.

Step 4: Review entity and schema

Your entity is the set of facts an engine holds about you: legal name, what you sell, where you operate, who runs the company. Search your name in each engine and read what comes back. Wrong or thin answers point to pages and profiles that disagree with each other.

Then validate your schema for Organization, Product and LocalBusiness. Structured data correlates only weakly with AI citations. It matters for rich results and feed consistency, so fix the errors and move on. Skip llms.txt as well, since Google discourages the file.

Step 5: Read your content and outside mentions

List your guide, comparison and FAQ pages. Does each one give the answer in its first two sentences? Ahrefs found in March 2026 that 38% of AI Overview citations come from the top 10 results and 31% from positions 11 to 100. A page ranking 40th can be cited if it answers cleanly, which is why an AI SEO audit still reads your ranking pages line by line.

Next, count where your brand is mentioned off your own site: review sites, industry roundups, directories, forums. Ahrefs measured a 0.66 correlation between third-party brand mentions and AI Overview visibility across 75,000 brands, against 0.22 for backlinks. Compare your list with the competitors that show up in your panel and note the gaps.

JCS Fashions, a 4,878-product Shopify apparel store in Milpitas, California, is the case we know best. It published about 290 quality-gated articles from April to September 2026, and its sessions from AI assistants went from 20 in January to 569 in October. The customer story has the monthly numbers.

What a finished AI visibility audit hands back

The output is a ranked fix list. Each fix names the prompts it should move, so you can re-run the panel from step 1 after the work ships and see the change. Anything that cannot be tied to a prompt goes to the bottom.

You can do all five steps yourself. Our paid version is the AI Visibility Audit. It costs $1,500, credited to month one if you continue to a managed plan (see pricing).

If you want a quick read before you open the spreadsheet, the free AI visibility scan shows where you stand today.