How to Audit Your Brand's AI Visibility in One Afternoon (Free Framework)

By David Bellairian, Founder of AIDiscover

Before you spend a dollar on "AI SEO," you should know exactly where you're starting from. Most brands don't — they're reacting to a hunch ("I asked ChatGPT once and we weren't there") rather than a real picture. This is the audit I actually walk clients through in the first working session, simplified so you can run the first pass yourself, for free, in about an afternoon.

You don't need special software for this version. You need ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, a spreadsheet, and about two hours of focused attention.

Step 1: Write your real questions, not your keywords

Most businesses start an audit with their SEO keywords, which is the wrong list. AI visibility isn't about keywords — it's about the actual questions a real person asks before choosing someone in your category. Write 15–20 of them, in plain conversational language, spanning four types of intent:

• Discovery: "who does [service] in [city]"

• Comparison: "[you] vs [competitor]" or "best [category] for [use case]"

• Evaluation: "is [you] any good," "is [you] legit," "reviews of [you]"

• Implementation: "how do I [thing your product/service helps with]"

This mirrors the structure recommended in Writer's 2026 GEO analysis — a spread of 20–30 category prompts is the standard they suggest for ongoing tracking, and 15–20 is a fine starting sample for a first pass.

Step 2: Run every question through three engines

Ask each question, fresh (new chat, no prior context), in:

1. ChatGPT

2. Perplexity

3. Google's AI mode / AI Overview (when one appears — remember it doesn't show up on every query)

For each answer, log four things in a simple spreadsheet: does your brand appear at all (yes/no), how it's described if it does, whether it's cited with a link or just mentioned by name, and whether the framing is accurate and positive, neutral, or wrong/outdated.

Don't skip the "wrong or outdated" check. It's common to discover an AI system confidently describing your business using pricing, services, or positioning that hasn't been true for a year or more — a real risk that's separate from the visibility question entirely.

Step 3: Note who is showing up instead of you

For every question where you're absent, write down who the engine names instead, and — this is the important part — try to figure out why. Is it a direct competitor with more reviews? A comparison article on a third-party site? A Reddit thread? A YouTube video? This single column usually tells you more about what to fix than anything else in the audit, because it shows you exactly which surface is winning the citation you're losing.

Step 4: Check whether AI can even read your site

Separately from what the engines are saying, check whether they can technically access your content at all. A large share of sites — Otterly AI's 2026 citation report puts it at roughly 73% — have some kind of barrier blocking AI crawlers: a restrictive robots.txt file, a CDN rule, or content that only renders via JavaScript with nothing readable in the raw HTML. This is a quick technical check (view your page source, and check your robots.txt file directly at yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and it's worth doing before you invest in a content strategy that a crawler can't even see.

Step 5: Score your third-party footprint

Since a large share of what gets cited by generative engines comes from pages you don't own — Writer's analysis puts it at around 85% of AI brand mentions originating from third-party sources — spend fifteen minutes taking honest stock of where your brand actually exists outside your own site:

• Do you have a meaningful number of reviews on the platforms relevant to your category?

• Has any trade publication, local press, or industry blog written about you in the last year?

• Is there any YouTube presence — your own or someone else's — that mentions you? (NetRanks' analysis found YouTube mentions had the single strongest correlation with ChatGPT citation of any signal they measured.)

• Would someone searching Reddit or a forum for your category find you mentioned by an actual customer, unprompted?

If most of these are blank, that's not a content problem on your website — it's a reputation and ecosystem-presence gap, and it needs a different kind of effort to close.

Step 6: Turn the findings into three lists, not one big to-do

Once you've run all five steps, sort what you found into:

1. Fix now — factually wrong information an AI system is repeating about you (the highest-priority category, since it's actively costing you trust, not just visibility).

2. Structural fixes — content on your own site that needs to be restructured for extraction (clear headings, direct answers, tables) or a technical barrier blocking crawlers.

3. Ecosystem gaps — the third-party presence (reviews, press, community mentions) that needs to be built over the coming months, since this is the slower, more strategic half of the work.

What this audit won't tell you

This is a real first pass, and it's genuinely useful — but it's a snapshot, not a monitoring system. AI answers vary by session, by model version, and by how the question is phrased, so a single afternoon's results should be treated as directional, not definitive. The next step, once you know roughly where you stand, is establishing a repeatable version of this check on a regular cadence rather than a one-time look.

If you'd rather have someone run this audit for you — with a wider question set, a documented before-and-after, and a plan for closing the specific gaps it turns up — book a free strategy session with AIDiscover and bring whatever you found in your own pass. It's a useful starting point either way.

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About David Bellairian

David Bellairian is the founder and CEO of AIDiscover, an AI-visibility and brand-discovery agency in Los Angeles. Before AIDiscover, he led marketing operations for a SaaS platform, where he helped increase lead quality by 40% through AI-driven automation, and he's since built AIDiscover's Entity Optimization methodology to keep brands visible to AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok. David speaks and mentors early-stage founders on AI strategy. Connect with David on LinkedIn, X, or Instagram, or read his full bio.

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Sources referenced in this article:

• Writer, "GEO, AEO, and SEO in 2026: The Enterprise Guide to AI Visibility"

• Otterly AI, "The AI Citation Economy: What 1+ Million Data Points Reveal About Visibility in 2026"

• NetRanks, "How ChatGPT, Claude & Perplexity Choose Which Brands to Cite" (2026)