AI Visibility Audit
Your buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews who they should be talking to, and those answers come back with specific company names on them. This audit measures whether one of those names is yours, benchmarks whoever is winning, and gives you a written plan for fixing it.
As standard I put your buyers’ real questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews, and read your Copilot citations straight out of Bing Webmaster Tools. If your buyers lean on something else, say so on the call and it goes into the question set.
Start here, it is free
It takes under a minute and tells you whether an AI agent can use your site at all. That is the technical floor. This audit answers the harder question: whether the assistants actually name you when your buyers ask.
The problem
A client asked me a question recently that almost nobody was asking a year ago: when someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a company like ours, do we show up?
Buyer research has moved into AI assistants, and an assistant does not hand back ten links to compare. It hands back three or four company names with a sentence about each. By the time a prospect fills in your form, the field was already narrowed somewhere you cannot see. If you were not in that answer, you never entered the deal, and nothing in your analytics will ever tell you it happened.
What your buyer types
Who are the best companies for this, and who would you recommend I talk to first?
What comes back
Generative engine optimization, GEO for short, is the work of getting your company named in the answers AI assistants give. You will also see it called AEO or AI search optimization. Three labels, one job.
Search engines rank pages. AI engines make a judgment. The model reads what the wider web says about your company, weighs independent sources more heavily than anything on your own site, and then decides whether it can recommend you with any confidence. A company with a perfectly healthy Google presence can be missing from every AI answer in its category, which is what I keep finding when I run the test.
The other difference is where the fix lives. Most SEO work happens on your website. Most of what decides an AI answer happens off it.
The deliverable
Some buyers call this an AI search audit or a GEO audit, where GEO stands for generative engine optimization, and the measurement and the deliverable are the same regardless of the name.
The audit is a flat, fixed fee of $500, and the game plan is included in that fee. Any ongoing work after the audit is scoped separately, only if you want it.
The audit is a fixed piece of work with a defined end. You own the plan whether or not I ever touch it again. If you want it executed for you instead of handed over, I run that as an ongoing program and we can size it on the call. Nothing about the audit depends on you buying the second thing. Book an intro call and we will start with what your buyers are actually asking.
What I do
I build the question set out of what your sales team hears on first calls, phrased the way buyers phrase it. Product names and brand searches are deliberately excluded, because those answers flatter you and tell you nothing.
Every question, in every major engine, in a fresh session with no leading and no hints. Each run gets recorded with what the engine said and why. You get the raw scoreboard, not a summary of it.
Somebody is getting named. I find out who it is in each answer, and more usefully, what the model says about them that it does not say about you. That sentence is where the whole diagnosis comes from.
Which lever is actually costing you the answer, and which work would change it. Ranked, so you know what to do first and what can wait.
What moves the answer
The audit is built on a framework called the Three-Lever Audit. It scores three levers: third-party authority, whether independent, credible sources vouch for you; liftable expertise, whether you have published expertise an AI can quote; and entity clarity, whether AI systems correctly understand what you are and what you do. The plan tells you which lever to fix first.
What independent sources say about you carries more weight than anything you publish yourself. Trade publications, industry associations, directories, review platforms, press coverage. The model reads outside sources as evidence and your homepage as a claim.
Plain sentences that state what you do, who you do it for, and what proof you have. A page titled “Conveyor Systems for Food and Beverage Manufacturing” can be quoted directly into an answer. A homepage promising to engineer tomorrow’s solutions today cannot be quoted into anything.
Whether a model can tell what you actually are. Consistent naming, one clear category, descriptions that agree across your site, your LinkedIn page, and every directory you appear in. Companies that describe themselves five different ways dilute their own identity.
Two disclosures, because overclaiming is how agencies get fired. Nobody outside these AI companies knows the exact weighting behind an answer, so treat the three levers as a well-supported operating model, short of a published algorithm. And this is not a schema trick. Structured data helps a machine parse a page, it does not give an engine a reason to trust you. Anyone selling an AI visibility fix that installs in an afternoon is selling you the afternoon.
Proof it finds things
Their buyers are attorneys and insurance adjusters, people who pick an expert by asking someone they trust. So we tested whether the assistants were naming them at all.
The shape of a question set. The real ones name your category and your region in the words your buyers use, and I build them from what your sales team hears on first calls. Brand and product searches are deliberately left out, because those answers flatter you and tell you nothing. Eight questions across four engines is 32 runs, fresh session every time, and never the client’s name first, because a model will happily discuss any company you introduce it to.
Thirty-two runs. They were named in none of them.
The useful part was in the engines’ own reasoning. On several runs I could watch the engine search the client by name, check their history and their reputation, weigh them against a competitor, and then leave them out of the answer anyway. They were not unknown. The engine looked directly at them and could not find enough usable evidence to put them forward. That is a different problem from nobody having heard of you, and it has a different fix.
Fit
As far as I can tell, almost nobody in industrial and manufacturing is working on this yet. That comes from my own searching rather than a formal study, so hold it loosely. It does mean the category is unusually open right now, and the first company in a niche to become clearly citable tends to keep the answer for a while.
Straight answers
No. I cannot control what a model outputs and neither can anybody else. What I can do is measure where you stand today, explain why, and fix the inputs the engines are demonstrably reading. If an agency guarantees you a place in an AI answer, that is a good reason to stop talking to that agency.
They overlap, but the target is different. SEO is trying to rank a page in a list of links. This is trying to get your company named inside an answer that never shows a list. The heaviest lever, what independent sources say about you, sits outside anything an SEO plugin touches.
Yes. AEO stands for answer engine optimization and GEO stands for generative engine optimization. Both describe the same underlying work as an AI visibility audit: measuring and improving whether AI assistants name a brand when buyers ask category-level questions. The terminology is still settling across the industry, so the audit itself matters more than the label.
Yes, and you should before you pay anyone to do anything. Ask an AI assistant the questions your buyers actually ask, in a fresh session, and see whether your name comes back. It costs nothing and it tells you whether you have a problem worth spending money on.
Longer than you would like, and I am not going to quote you a number I cannot defend. The fixes on your own site are quick to make. Getting independent sources to say the right things about you takes months, and that is usually the lever doing the most work. This service is new enough that I do not have a clean median across enough clients to give you an honest timeline yet, and I would rather tell you that than invent one.
I probe ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews with your buyers’ real questions, and I read your Copilot citations straight out of Bing Webmaster Tools, which is first-party data instead of a sample. Claude and Grok are worth watching and are climbing fast, so if your buyers lean on those or on an industry-specific tool, say so on the call and they go into the question set.
Then the audit says so, and the plan changes from getting into the answer to staying in it. Being named once is not a moat. The work becomes widening the gap between you and whoever is second, which is a better problem than the one most companies have.
Bring two questions your buyers actually ask. We will run them live on the call and you will see exactly what I see.
Book an intro call