How to Audit Your AI Visibility in 30 Minutes (Free Checklist)

Forty-four percent of consumers now prefer AI search over traditional search when making buying decisions. Nearly half have used an AI assistant to help with a purchase in the past year. And 75% say they are using AI search tools more today than they were twelve months ago.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: most businesses have never checked what these platforms actually say about them.

They know where they rank for their target keywords. But when a potential customer asks ChatGPT "What is the best accounting firm in Oslo?" or tells Perplexity "Compare project management tools for small teams," they have no idea whether their brand appears, how it is described, or what competitors are recommended instead.

This is a blind spot in the fastest-growing discovery channel in marketing. AI search traffic has increased over 500% year-over-year. By 2028, AI-powered search is projected to surpass traditional search entirely.

The good news: you can get a baseline understanding of your AI visibility in 30 minutes. No paid tools required. Just a browser, a spreadsheet, and the checklist below.

What You Will Need

Before you start the timer, gather these items:

• A spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) with columns for: Platform, Query, Brand Mentioned (Yes/No), Position (1st, 2nd, 3rd, or Not Listed), Sentiment (Positive/Neutral/Negative), Competitors Mentioned, Notes
• Accounts on the major AI platforms: ChatGPT (chat.openai.com), Perplexity (perplexity.ai), Google Gemini (gemini.google.com), Claude (claude.ai), Microsoft Copilot (copilot.microsoft.com)
• Access to your website's robots.txt file (yourdomain.com/robots.txt)
• Your top three competitors' names
• Five to ten queries your ideal customers would ask when looking for your product or service

For the queries, think like a buyer, not a marketer. Instead of "enterprise SaaS CRM solutions," use "What is the best CRM for a 20-person sales team?" The more natural and conversational, the better.

Minutes 1 to 5: Query Your Brand Across AI Platforms

Open all five AI platforms in separate browser tabs. For each one, run two types of queries:

Branded queries (queries that include your company name):

• "What is [Your Brand]?"
• "Tell me about [Your Brand]"
• "Is [Your Brand] any good?"

Category queries (queries about your industry where you should appear):

• "What are the best [your category] companies in [your city/country]?"
• "Who should I hire for [your service]?"
• "Compare the top [your product type] options"

For each response, log the following in your spreadsheet:

1. Mentioned? Did your brand appear at all? A simple yes or no.
2. Position. Were you the first brand mentioned, second, third, or buried further down?
3. Accuracy. Is the information about your company correct? Check for outdated descriptions, wrong locations, incorrect product details, or attribution of services you do not offer.
4. Sentiment. Is your brand described positively ("highly regarded," "trusted"), neutrally ("offers services in"), or negatively ("has received criticism for")?
5. Sources cited. If the platform shows sources, note which websites are being cited. This tells you where the AI is pulling its information about your category.

What to watch for: Each platform has its own training data and retrieval methods. Perplexity and Copilot pull from live web sources and cite them. ChatGPT and Claude draw more heavily from training data. Gemini blends both. If you are invisible on one platform but visible on another, that tells you where your online presence is strong and where it has gaps.

Minutes 6 to 10: Query Your Top Three Competitors

Now run the same category queries, but pay attention to which competitors appear. Add three columns to your spreadsheet: Competitor A, Competitor B, Competitor C. For each query, mark whether they were mentioned and in what position.

Run these additional comparative queries:

• "[Your Brand] vs [Competitor A]"
• "Which is better, [Your Brand] or [Competitor B]?"
• "Alternatives to [Competitor C]"

Calculate your preliminary Share of AI Voice. Count the total number of brand mentions across all your category queries (yours plus all competitors), then divide your mentions by the total. If you were mentioned 3 times out of 20 total brand mentions, your Share of AI Voice is 15%.

The formula: (Your Mentions / Total Mentions Across All Brands) x 100

For context: a Share of AI Voice under 20% means your brand has limited presence and needs attention. Between 20% and 49% indicates healthy traction with room to grow. Above 50% means you are the dominant voice in your category on that platform.

What to watch for: Note the language AI uses to describe your competitors versus you. Are competitors described as "industry-leading" while you are called "another option"? Are competitors cited with specific evidence while your brand gets a generic mention? This framing shapes first impressions for a growing share of buyers.

Minutes 11 to 15: Check Your robots.txt for AI Crawler Blocks

This is the technical step most people skip, and it is arguably the most important. Navigate to yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser and check whether you are blocking any AI crawlers.

Here are the user agents you need to look for:

If your robots.txt file contains lines like:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

You are actively blocking these platforms from crawling your content. This is a critical finding. Research shows 73% of websites have technical barriers preventing AI crawlers from accessing their content. Many site owners do not realize these blocks exist because they were added by a CMS plugin, a hosting provider's default, or a previous developer.

Important nuance: Blocking training bots (like GPTBot or ClaudeBot) does not necessarily block search bots (like OAI-SearchBot or Claude-SearchBot). OpenAI and Anthropic each operate multi-tier crawler systems. You may want to block training while still allowing search retrieval; that distinction is controlled at the user-agent level.

While you are checking robots.txt, also check for these two files:

• yourdomain.com/llms.txt: An emerging standard (proposed at llmstxt.org) that provides AI systems with a structured Markdown summary of your site's most important content. If you do not have one, that is worth noting. It signals AI-readiness and provides a clean content summary for language models.
• yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml: Confirm your sitemap is accessible. AI search crawlers use sitemaps for content discovery, just like traditional search crawlers do.

Score this section carefully. If you are blocking all AI crawlers, you have identified potentially the single biggest barrier to your AI visibility.

Minutes 16 to 20: Search Reddit for Your Brand

This step surprises most people, but Reddit is one of the most influential sources feeding AI recommendations. OpenAI licensed Reddit's data for training. Perplexity cites Reddit threads frequently. Google's AI Overviews pull Reddit content regularly. Research suggests that roughly 40% of AI citations trace back to Reddit content.

Open Reddit (reddit.com) and search for:

1. Your brand name. What are people saying? Are there recommendation threads where your brand is mentioned positively, negatively, or not at all?
2. Your category terms. Search for "best [your product/service]" or "recommendations for [your category]." Which brands are the community recommending?
3. Your competitors' names. How are competitors being discussed? Are they getting organic endorsements in relevant subreddits?

Log your findings:

• Brand sentiment on Reddit: Positive, Neutral, Negative, or Absent
• Competitor presence on Reddit: Which competitors are actively discussed?
• Subreddit relevance: Are there active subreddits where your target customers gather and discuss your category?

What to watch for: AI models perform sentiment analysis on Reddit threads when determining recommendations. A thread where users enthusiastically recommend your competitor while criticizing your product becomes training data that shapes how AI describes both brands.

If your brand is completely absent from Reddit, that is a finding in itself. You are missing one of the largest inputs to AI training data, and competitors who are present there have an advantage you need to close.

Minutes 21 to 25: Audit Your Content Structure

AI platforms do not just read your content. They parse it. The structure of your pages determines how easily AI can extract, understand, and cite your information. Open your website and evaluate the following:

1. FAQ Sections Do your key pages include clearly structured FAQ sections? Pages with FAQ schema markup earn significantly higher AI citation rates. While Google removed FAQ rich results from traditional SERPs, AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews actively crawl and cite FAQ structured data. Check for FAQ content on your:

• Homepage
• Service or product pages
• About page
• Key blog posts

2. Schema Markup Use Google's Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results) or the Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org) to test your key pages. The most important schema types for AI visibility are:

• Organization (your company details, logo, social profiles)
• LocalBusiness (if you serve a specific area)
• Product or Service (what you offer)
• FAQPage (question and answer content)
• Article (blog posts and guides)
• Review / AggregateRating (social proof)

Pages with clean heading structures paired with proper schema markup earn up to 2.8x higher AI citation rates than poorly structured pages.

3. Entity Definitions AI models think in entities, not keywords. Check whether your content clearly defines:

• What your company is (one clear sentence)
• What problem you solve (stated explicitly)
• Who you serve (target audience defined)
• How you compare to alternatives (positioned clearly)

Look at the first 100 words of your homepage and top landing pages. If an AI model read only those words, would it understand your brand clearly enough to recommend you?

4. Comparison and "Best Of" Content Do you have content that positions your brand in category comparisons? Articles like "How to Choose the Right [Your Category] Provider" or pages comparing your offering to alternatives give AI platforms the structured, comparative data they need to include you in recommendation responses.

Minutes 26 to 30: Score Yourself and Prioritize

Now tally your results using the scoring rubric below. Rate each area on a scale of 0 to 10.

Scoring Rubric

1. AI Platform Presence (0 to 10)

• 0: Brand not mentioned on any platform
• 3: Mentioned on one or two platforms with inaccurate or outdated information
• 5: Mentioned on most platforms with generally accurate information
• 7: Mentioned on all platforms, mostly in positive context, with correct details
• 10: Consistently recommended across all platforms, first or second position, accurate and positive framing

2. Competitive Positioning (0 to 10)

• 0: Competitors dominate; your brand is never mentioned alongside them
• 3: Competitors mentioned far more frequently; you appear occasionally
• 5: Roughly equal mention frequency with competitors
• 7: You appear more often than most competitors in category queries
• 10: You are the dominant brand in AI responses for your category

3. Technical Access (0 to 10)

• 0: All major AI crawlers blocked; no sitemap; no structured data
• 3: Some crawlers blocked; sitemap exists but has issues
• 5: No crawlers blocked; sitemap accessible; minimal schema markup
• 7: Crawlers allowed; clean sitemap; key schema types implemented
• 10: All crawlers allowed with intentional strategy; llms.txt present; comprehensive schema markup; JSON-LD on all key pages

4. Reddit and Community Presence (0 to 10)

• 0: Brand completely absent from Reddit and community forums
• 3: Brand mentioned rarely, with mixed or negative sentiment
• 5: Brand discussed occasionally, neutral to positive sentiment
• 7: Brand regularly recommended in relevant subreddits, positive sentiment
• 10: Strong organic advocacy across multiple relevant communities; consistently recommended in "best of" threads

5. Content Structure (0 to 10)

• 0: No FAQ sections, no schema markup, no entity definitions, no comparison content
• 3: Some FAQ content but unstructured; minimal schema
• 5: FAQ sections on key pages; basic Organization schema; entity definitions present
• 7: Structured FAQ with schema; multiple schema types; clear entity definitions; some comparison content
• 10: Comprehensive FAQ schema across site; full schema coverage; strong entity definitions; comparison and "best of" content that positions brand clearly

Interpreting Your Total Score

Add up your five scores for a total out of 50.

Free Tools to Help You Go Deeper

If your 30-minute audit revealed gaps you want to investigate further, these free tools can help:

• Semrush AI Search Visibility Checker (semrush.com/free-tools/ai-search-visibility-checker): Automated scans across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Provides an AI visibility score and competitor comparison.
• Google Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results): Test any page for valid schema markup.
• Schema Markup Validator (validator.schema.org): Validate your structured data against schema.org standards.
• Otterly.ai (otterly.ai): AI search monitoring across six platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity. Tracks Share of AI Voice over time. Free 14-day trial; paid plans from $29/month.
• GoVISIBLE (govisible.ai): Free AI visibility audit tool that measures how often GPT, Gemini, and Perplexity surface your brand.
• HubSpot AI Search Grader: Free initial assessment of your AI search presence.

What This Audit Cannot Tell You

A 30-minute manual audit gives you a snapshot, not a trend line. It tells you where you stand today but not how your visibility is changing over time or how your competitors' strategies are shifting.

AI responses also vary based on phrasing, timing, and model version. The query you ran at 9 AM on Tuesday may produce different results at 3 PM on Thursday. Meaningful AI visibility measurement requires tracking dozens of queries across multiple platforms on a regular cadence.

This is where a professional audit adds value. At CiteDelta, our AI Visibility Audit queries all major platforms with a comprehensive prompt library tailored to your industry, benchmarks you against your full competitive set, analyzes technical barriers, maps citation sources, and establishes baseline metrics we track over time. We have helped clients achieve over 580% increases in AI visibility within 90 days by closing exactly the kinds of gaps this checklist reveals.

If your score was below 30, or if you found surprises in what AI platforms are saying about your brand, that deeper analysis is worth considering.

Start Now, Not Later

The window for establishing AI visibility is open right now. With 37% of consumers already starting searches with AI instead of Google, and 64% planning to use AI chatbots for shopping in 2026, the brands that audit and optimize their AI presence today will be the ones recommended tomorrow.

The spreadsheet you just built is your baseline. Run this audit again in 30 days and compare. The brands winning in AI search are not doing anything mysterious: they make content accessible to AI crawlers, structure it so AI can parse and cite it, and build authentic community presence that AI models trust. This checklist gives you the map. The next step is yours.

Want a comprehensive AI visibility audit with ongoing monitoring and optimization? Learn about CiteDelta's AI Visibility Audit and find out exactly where your brand stands across every major AI platform.