What is an AI visibility audit?

RushilFounder, Ru Visibility2 October 2026

Short answer

An AI visibility audit checks whether AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews can reach your website, understand what your business does, and find enough evidence to mention you. Think of it as an SEO audit aimed at being named in an answer, rather than at ranking in a list.

What it looks at

A good one covers five things, roughly in the order they can stop you:

Access. Whether the crawlers AI tools use can fetch your pages at all. Each company runs its own: OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT search, PerplexityBot does the same for Perplexity, and Claude-SearchBot for Claude. A rule in your robots.txt file or a security setting can turn any of them away.
Readability. Whether your important text is in the page itself, rather than only appearing after JavaScript runs, and whether it says plainly what you do, for whom and where.
Answers. Whether your pages answer the questions customers actually ask, in a sentence or two each, so a tool can lift the answer without guessing.
Identity. Whether your business is described the same way on your site, your Google Business Profile and directories, and whether your site links those profiles together so a machine can tell they are one business.
Evidence. Reviews, press, associations and other sites mentioning you. AI tools lean on what others say, not only on what you say about yourself.

Some audits also ask the AI tools real customer questions and record whether you come up. That is useful as a snapshot, but answers change between runs and between people, so a single test proves little on its own.

How it differs from an SEO audit

There is a lot of overlap. Google says plainly that “the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search” (Google Search Central). A site Google can't read is usually hard for AI tools to read too.

The differences are in the details. An SEO audit rarely checks whether ChatGPT's or Perplexity's crawlers are blocked, because they don't affect Google rankings. It measures a position in a list, where an AI visibility audit looks at whether, and how accurately, you are mentioned. And it judges pages as whole documents, where AI tools tend to pick out single facts and short passages.

What you should get at the end

A short list of what is holding you back, ordered by how much each fix is worth for the effort, in plain English. Anything the auditor could only estimate should be labelled as an estimate, not dressed up as a measurement. And nobody should promise you a mention: no one controls what these tools say.

Ours is free for a first look: send us your web address using the form below and we send you the whole result, not a taster.

Sources

Find out what AI says about you.

Send us your web address. We run our own tool on it, free, and send you what it says. The whole thing — not a taster with the useful bits taken out.

Whether AI can even read your site

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google and Bing all send a small program to read your pages. We knock on your door as each one and see who gets let in. If they are being turned away, nothing else matters until that is fixed.

Two scores out of 100 — one for Google, one for AI

Plus what is behind each number. Where we could only make a fair guess, we say so instead of dressing it up as a measurement.

A list of fixes, best one first

Ordered by what gives you the most for the least work, so the top of the list is the quickest win. It is yours either way — use it with us or without us.

We ran it on our own site too. It told us what we were getting wrong, and we published that. A tool you will not point at yourself is not worth much.

One thing the free check does not do: actually ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for businesses like yours, dozens of times, and count how often your name comes up. That costs us real money each time we run it, so it comes with paid work.