The $0 AI Visibility Audit: Check What Every Major LLM Is Saying About Your Brand Right Now

Before you start: understand what you are measuring

This audit gives you a directional snapshot of your AI visibility — not a statistically precise measurement. You are manually testing four platforms with four prompts each (16-20 queries total), running each query once. A single-run audit cannot give you statistical confidence in your mention rate. What it can give you is a clear picture of which engines are ignoring you, which intent types your competitors dominate, and whether the AI narrative about your brand matches your intended positioning.

For each engine, open a fresh incognito window before running queries. This minimizes personalization bias from your own search history. Do not use your logged-in account if you are a power user of any of these platforms — your session history will skew results.

The five query types to test per engine

Audit query types — replace [Brand] and [Category]

The scoring rubric

For each query run, score the result across three dimensions. Track results in a spreadsheet with one row per query, one column per dimension.

Presence score (0-2)

2 — Primary mention: your brand is the recommended answer

1 — Listed mention: your brand appears in a list or comparison

0 — Absent: your brand does not appear

Accuracy score (0-2)

2 — Accurate: description, pricing, and positioning match current reality

1 — Partially accurate: some elements are correct, some outdated or missing

0 — Inaccurate: contains factual errors or significant misrepresentation

Framing score (0-2)

2 — Positive: framed as preferred choice, strong, or recommended

1 — Neutral: mentioned without strong positive or negative framing

0 — Negative: mentioned with caveats, limitations, or as secondary option

ChatGPT: specific prompts and what to watch for

Use ChatGPT with Browse enabled (the globe icon in the message input). This tests live citation behavior, not just training data. Key signals to watch: whether ChatGPT browses your website as a source, which competitor pages it retrieves for comparison queries, and whether it shows your brand in the "Searched the web for" sources.

Additional ChatGPT-specific prompt: "I need to solve [problem your product solves]. What are the best options available in 2026?" — This tests whether you appear in solution-oriented queries that match your product's core use case.

Perplexity: specific prompts and what to watch for

In Perplexity, look at the sources panel on the right side of each response. This shows you exactly which pages Perplexity retrieved to generate the answer. If your website appears in the sources, you have a retrieval advantage. If competitor pages dominate the sources, that explains why competitor brands appear in the response.

If you have Pro access, use Focus mode set to "Web" for fair comparison testing. The "Academic" and "Reddit" focus modes will produce systematically different results that do not reflect general AI search behavior.

Gemini: specific prompts and what to watch for

Gemini is more conservative about recommending specific brands than ChatGPT or Perplexity — it often hedges with "results may vary" language. Watch for whether your brand appears in the knowledge graph panel (the sidebar information) when you query your brand directly. The knowledge graph appearance indicates Google has strong entity confidence in your brand.

Claude: specific prompts and what to watch for

Claude with web search behaves differently from ChatGPT and Perplexity — it tends to be more skeptical of single-source information and more likely to note limitations or context. Watch for whether Claude presents your brand with confidence or adds hedging language ("according to the company," "claims to," "reportedly") — these hedges indicate low entity confidence or insufficient third-party validation.

Interpreting your results

Pattern-to-diagnosis mapping

Fix priorities based on your audit score

Maximum possible score across 20 queries (4 engines × 5 query types) across 3 dimensions is 120 points. Interpret your total:

90-120: Strong baseline. Focus on moving from Tier 2 (shortlisted) to Tier 1 (primary recommendation) citations. 60-89: Moderate visibility. Prioritize schema implementation and cross-platform entity presence. 30-59: Significant gaps. Start with entity definition (Organization schema + DefinedTerm), then FAQPage schema for comparison queries. 0-29: Critical gaps. Run a full RankAsAnswer audit to get a complete diagnostic before investing in fixes.

Automate your AI visibility audit Get statistically valid results across 100+ prompt runs — not 20. Narrative Drift explained What to do when the AI narrative about your brand has silently changed.