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Guide

The DIY AI visibility audit

Ten checks, one afternoon, no tools to buy. Run these and you will know exactly how visible your business is to AI assistants, and where you are losing.

The ten checks

  1. Ask the four big assistants about your category. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity: "best [service] in [town]". Are you named? Who is?
  2. Ask about your business by name. "Is [business] any good?" Does the AI know you exist, and is what it says accurate?
  3. Check your robots.txt. Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot are disallowed, AI systems are locked out.
  4. Test a service page for structured data. Paste the URL into a schema validator. No structured data means AI must guess your facts from prose.
  5. Read your homepage as a stranger. Within ten seconds, does it say what you do, who for and where? If a human has to hunt, a model does too.
  6. Count your question-answering content. How many literal customer questions does your site answer in full sentences? Zero is the most common answer.
  7. Google your own name, address and phone number. Do your website, Google Business Profile and directories agree exactly? Inconsistency destroys machine confidence.
  8. Check your reviews footprint. Recent, substantive reviews on visible platforms are trust signals models can see.
  9. Look for proof of expertise. Is there anything on your site a model could cite as evidence you know your field, beyond claims about yourself?
  10. Check your site loads fast and renders as text. Slow, script-heavy pages that render nothing without JavaScript are hard for crawlers to read at all.

Scoring yourself

Passing seven or more: you are ahead of nearly every small business, and targeted work will sharpen your edge. Passing four to six: you are findable but not recommendable, which is where most established businesses land. Three or fewer: you are effectively invisible to AI, and the customers asking assistants for recommendations are being sent elsewhere.

What the checks do not cover

This audit finds the gaps; it does not fill them. The fixes are structured work: schema markup, page restructuring, question-led content, citations and authority content. That is what a full campaign delivers, as described on the how it works page.

Prefer the professional version?

The AI Search King audit measures all of this properly and shows you competitors' scores next to yours. It is where every campaign starts.

Book your free AI Strategy Call →