How to Run a DIY AI Visibility Audit (Step-by-Step)

How to Check Your AI Visibility for Free (in Under an Hour)

AI platforms are answering your customers’ questions right now. The question is whether they’re mentioning your brand when they do.

You don’t need expensive tools or a consultant to get a first read on where you stand. This guide walks you through a DIY AI visibility audit — step by step, using free tools and about 45 minutes of your time.

What you’ll get is a directional snapshot: who AI recommends in your space, whether your brand shows up, and where the obvious gaps are. It won’t replace a comprehensive AI visibility audit, but it will tell you whether you have a problem worth solving.

Let’s get into it.

Why This Matters Right Now

AI-generated answers are reshaping how people find businesses. Zero-click searches now account for 69% of Google queries, and AI Overviews have dropped click-through rates by 61% on covered topics. That means fewer people are clicking through to websites — they’re reading the AI-generated answer and moving on.

Meanwhile, only 23% of marketers are actively investing in generative engine optimization. That gap between impact and adoption is your window.

The GEO market is projected to grow from $850 million to $7.3 billion by 2031 — a 34% compound annual growth rate. Businesses that show up in AI answers now are building an advantage that compounds over time.

Here’s what makes this worth your attention: AI-referred traffic converts at 4.4x the rate of traditional organic search. People who arrive at your site through an AI citation are further along in their decision-making. They’ve already gotten context from the AI — your brand was the recommended next step.

Step 1: Define Your Audit Questions (10 Minutes)

Before you start querying AI platforms, you need the right questions. These should mirror what your actual customers ask when they’re researching a purchase decision.

Write down 5–10 questions that fit these categories:

“Best of” and comparison queries:

• “What are the best [your service] companies in [your city/industry]?”
• “Who are the top [your category] providers for [your audience]?”

How-to and educational queries:

• “How do I choose a [your service type]?”
• “What should I look for in a [your product category]?”

Problem-specific queries:

• “How do I fix [problem your product solves]?”
• “What’s the best way to handle [challenge your customers face]?”

Direct recommendation queries:

• “Can you recommend a [your service] for [specific use case]?”
• “Which [your category] company is best for small businesses?”

Write these down in a document or spreadsheet. You’ll run the same questions across multiple platforms, so having them ready saves time.

Tip: Include at least two questions where you’d expect a competitor to show up. That gives you a comparison point — if competitors are cited and you’re not, that’s a clear signal.

Step 2: Query Four AI Platforms (15 Minutes)

Open these four platforms and run each of your questions through all of them:

1. ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) — the largest user base
2. Perplexity (perplexity.ai) — built for research queries, cites sources heavily
3. Google Gemini (gemini.google.com) — powers Google’s AI Overviews
4. Claude (claude.ai) — growing user base, often used for business research

For each query on each platform, record:

• Were you mentioned? Yes or no.
• Where in the response? First recommendation, mentioned in a list, or not at all.
• Who was mentioned instead? Write down every competitor name that appears.
• Was your website cited as a source? Some platforms link to sources — check if your content is being used.
• What was the overall sentiment? Positive, neutral, or negative about your category.

What you’re looking for: Patterns. If three out of four platforms recommend the same two competitors and you’re absent from all of them, that’s not a fluke. That’s a visibility gap.

Step 3: Check Your Robots.txt for AI Crawlers (5 Minutes)

AI platforms can only cite your content if their crawlers can access it. Many websites accidentally block AI crawlers — sometimes through default CMS settings, sometimes through overzealous robots.txt rules.

Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser. Then check whether any of these 14 AI crawlers are blocked:

AI Crawler Checklist

• GPTBot — OpenAI (ChatGPT)
• OAI-SearchBot — OpenAI search features
• ClaudeBot — Anthropic (Claude)
• anthropic-ai — Anthropic (alternate crawler)
• PerplexityBot — Perplexity
• Google-Extended — Google AI training and Gemini
• Bytespider — ByteDance AI
• Applebot-Extended — Apple AI features
• CCBot — Common Crawl (feeds many AI systems)
• cohere-ai — Cohere AI models
• Amazonbot — Amazon AI features
• FacebookBot — Meta AI
• meta-externalagent — Meta AI (newer crawler)
• YouBot — You.com AI search

What you’re looking for is any line that says Disallow: / under one of these user agents. That means the crawler is explicitly blocked from your entire site.

If your robots.txt has a blanket Disallow: / for all user agents, or specifically blocks GPTBot and ClaudeBot, you’ve found an immediate problem. Your content can’t be cited if it can’t be crawled.

Important caveat: Allowing crawlers doesn’t guarantee citation. It just removes the barrier. But blocking them does guarantee you won’t be cited — so this is a quick win to check.

Step 4: Verify Your Schema Markup (10 Minutes)

Schema markup helps AI platforms understand what your content is about, who your organization is, and how your pages relate to each other. Without it, AI systems have to guess — and they’ll often guess wrong or skip you entirely.

Use Google’s free Rich Results Test (https://search.google.com/test/rich-results) or Schema Markup Validator (https://validator.schema.org/). Paste in your homepage URL and your top 3–5 content pages.

Check for these schema types:

• Organization — Does your homepage declare who you are, what you do, where you’re located?
• LocalBusiness (if applicable) — Service area, hours, contact info
• Article or BlogPosting — Are your blog posts and guides marked up as articles?
• FAQPage — Do your FAQ sections use FAQ schema?
• Service or Product — Are your offerings described in structured data?

If you see no schema markup at all, that’s a significant gap. AI platforms rely on structured data to build their knowledge about entities (businesses, people, products). Without it, you’re harder to index and less likely to be recommended.

Step 5: Scan Your Brand Presence on Key Platforms (10 Minutes)

AI models don’t just pull from websites. They learn from platforms where people discuss, review, and reference businesses. A quick scan of these sources tells you how much raw material exists for AI to work with.

Search your brand name on each of these:

• YouTube — Do any videos mention or review your company?
• Reddit — Are you discussed in relevant subreddits?
• LinkedIn — Does your company page have regular content? Do employees post about your work?
• Wikipedia — Does your brand or founder have a page? (Long shot for most businesses, but Wikipedia references carry heavy weight in AI training data.)
• Industry directories and review sites — Clutch, G2, Capterra, Yelp, industry-specific directories

What you’re looking for: Volume and recency. If your brand appears on LinkedIn and nowhere else, AI platforms have very little to work with when someone asks about your category.

Step 6: Score What You Found

Now pull it together. For each area, give yourself a simple rating:

Area	Strong	Needs Work	Gap
AI platform mentions (Step 2)	Named in 3+ platforms	Named in 1-2	Absent
Robots.txt (Step 3)	All crawlers allowed	Some blocked	Most blocked
Schema markup (Step 4)	Organization + Article + FAQ	Basic only	None
Brand presence (Step 5)	4+ platforms	1-2 platforms	Website only

If you scored “Gap” in two or more areas, AI platforms are likely recommending your competitors instead of you. That’s not a future risk — it’s happening now, every time someone asks an AI about your category.

What DIY Tells You (and What It Doesn’t)

This audit gives you a directional read. You’ll know whether you’re visible, which competitors dominate, and where the obvious technical barriers are.

What it won’t tell you:

• Tracking over time. A single snapshot doesn’t show whether you’re gaining or losing ground.
• Volume and frequency. You tested 5–10 queries. Your customers are asking hundreds of variations.
• Competitive depth. You saw who showed up. You didn’t analyze why.
• Prioritization. Knowing you have gaps is step one. Knowing which gaps to close first requires deeper analysis.

Free tools like Adamigo, GoVISIBLE, and Causo can extend your reach slightly beyond manual queries. They’re worth trying, but they still provide spot checks, not systematic tracking. See the full tool landscape for what’s available and what each one actually does.

When to Consider Professional Help

Here are the honest signals that a DIY approach has reached its limit:

You found gaps but don’t know the fix. If AI platforms consistently cite competitors and ignore you, the solution isn’t just “make more content.” It’s understanding what content, structured how, targeting which queries, with what schema — and in what order.

You need ongoing tracking. AI responses shift. What works today may not work in three months as models retrain. If AI visibility matters to your business, you need monitoring, not occasional spot checks.

Your competitors are already investing. If your audit revealed competitors with rich schema, active content across multiple platforms, and consistent AI citations — they’re not doing that by accident. They have a strategy. Matching it requires one too.

You’re spending on ads but invisible in AI. If you’re paying for Google Ads while AI answers redirect your potential customers to competitors for free, you have a leak in your funnel that ad spend can’t fix.

A professional AI visibility audit covers everything in this guide plus competitive intelligence, historical tracking, query landscape mapping, and a prioritized action plan.

If you want to evaluate providers, look for ones that actually track AI platform responses over time, not just traditional SEO metrics with “AI” added to the label. The difference between an AI audit and a traditional SEO audit matters — make sure you’re getting the right one.

Start With What You Can See

You now have a repeatable process for checking your AI visibility. Run through these six steps quarterly at minimum — the landscape shifts fast as AI platforms update their models and training data.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s awareness. Most businesses have no idea whether AI platforms recommend them or their competitors. After 45 minutes with this guide, you do.

What you do with that information is up to you.