AI visibility audit
An AI visibility audit checks whether AI answer engines can access your site and how they currently describe and cite your brand. It covers four areas: technical access (robots.txt, firewalls, indexing), first-party reports (Search Console, Bing), prompt testing across engines, and accuracy of what is said. The template below can be run with free tools.
What does an AI visibility audit check?
| Area | Check | How |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Search crawlers allowed: OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot; Googlebot/Bingbot | robots.txt and firewall rules;[1][2][3] Search Console robots.txt report[4] |
| Eligibility | Key pages indexed, no accidental nosnippet/noindex | URL Inspection[5] |
| First-party data | AI Overview/AI Mode impressions; Copilot citations | Generative AI report;[6] Bing AI Performance[7] |
| Referrals | Traffic from AI engines | Analytics; ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com[8] |
| Prompt test | Mentions, citations, position, competitors | Fixed prompt set run on each engine |
| Accuracy | Facts about the brand correct? | Compare answers with your own facts |
How do you build the prompt set?
- Branded prompts (“What is [brand]?”, “[brand] pricing”).
- Category prompts (“best [category] for [use case]”).
- Problem prompts your content answers.
- Comparison prompts against named competitors.
Run each prompt more than once: answers vary between runs, which is why the GEO paper sampled five responses per query at temperature 0.7.[9]
What should the audit report include?
- Access issues found and fixed.
- Baseline mention rate and citation rate per engine.
- Competitors mentioned instead of you.
- Sources cited for your topics (targets for digital PR).
- Inaccuracies to correct; see brand sentiment in AI.
Frequently asked questions
Can I do an AI visibility audit for free?
Yes. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, your analytics and manual prompt testing cover the essentials.
How often should I audit?
Re-run the prompt set monthly or quarterly; check access after any CDN, firewall or robots.txt change.
Do paid tools do this automatically?
Many track prompts and mentions on a schedule; see AI visibility tools.
See also
References
Sources accessed October 14, 2026 unless another date is given. See all sources.
- “Overview of OpenAI Crawlers”. OpenAI. accessed October 14, 2026.
- “Perplexity Crawlers”. Perplexity. accessed October 14, 2026.
- “Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?”. Anthropic (Claude Help Center). updated April 7, 2026.
- “robots.txt report”. Search Console Help. accessed October 14, 2026.
- “URL Inspection tool”. Search Console Help. accessed October 14, 2026.
- “Generative AI performance report (Search)”. Search Console Help. rolled out to all sites as of August 31, 2026; accessed October 14, 2026.
- “AI Performance”. Bing Webmaster Tools Help. accessed October 14, 2026.
- “Publishers and Developers FAQ”. OpenAI Help Center. accessed October 14, 2026.
- “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”. arXiv (Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan, Deshpande). v1 submitted November 16, 2023; published at KDD ’24.