How to Audit and Improve Your Brand’s AI Visibility Step-by-Step

When a customer asks an AI assistant which product or service to choose, the assistant writes one answer. Your brand is in that answer or it is not. This guide shows how to find out which, and what to do about it.

The process has two halves. The audit tells you where you stand. The improvement plan tells you what to change. Each half has five steps, and you can complete the first with nothing more than a spreadsheet.

Part 1: The audit

Step 1: Build a list of real buyer questions

An audit is only as good as the questions behind it. Write down 20 to 30 questions a genuine buyer would ask, grouped into three types:

• Category questions: “What is the best [product type] for [customer type]?”
• Comparison questions: “[Your brand] vs [competitor]” and “alternatives to [competitor]”
• Problem questions: “How do I [task your product helps with]?”

Take the wording from places buyers actually write: Reddit and Quora threads, customer emails, sales call notes and search suggestions. Questions you invent yourself tend to sound like marketing, and assistants are asked questions that sound like people.

Step 2: Run the questions across several assistants

Ask each question in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers. The assistants differ, so a result from one does not describe the others. Use a fresh conversation each time so earlier answers do not shape later ones.

Step 3: Repeat the run

Answers vary from one run to the next. You can confirm this by asking the same question a few times and comparing the replies. Run your list at least three times, ideally across a couple of weeks, and treat the pattern as the result, not any single answer.

Step 4: Record what you see

For each question and assistant, log four things:

Do the same for two or three competitors. Share of voice is simply your mentions divided by all brand mentions in your category.

Step 5: Find the pattern

Look for three things. Which question types never mention you? Which competitor appears most, and on which assistants? Which sources show up again and again? The repeated sources are the most useful finding, because they show where the assistants are getting their information.

Part 2: The improvement plan

Step 6: Compare your page with the page that won

For each important question where a competitor is cited and you are not, open both pages side by side. Note the differences you can see:

• How recently was each page updated, and is the date visible?
• Does the page answer the question in its first few lines?
• Is the page organized with clear headings and short sections?
• Is the information specific (numbers, names, steps) or general?
• Does it use structured data, such as FAQ or article markup?

These are not guaranteed causes. They are the most practical places to start, and changing them is within your control.

Step 7: Fix the content you own

Start with the pages that matter most to buyers. Update outdated facts and prices. Put a direct answer near the top. Add the questions buyers really ask, with plain answers. Keep claims specific and honest, because vague or inflated copy gives an assistant little to work with.

Step 8: Check that machines can read your site

Confirm that your site does not block the crawlers that assistants use, and that your key pages load as ordinary text rather than being hidden behind scripts. A page that cannot be read cannot be used.

Step 9: Earn mentions outside your own site

Assistants often point to third-party sources: review sites, comparison articles, forums and industry publications. If your audit showed the same outside sources appearing repeatedly, those are the places to be accurately represented. That can mean contributing useful expert answers in communities, publishing original research others can reference, or providing correct information to the review sites that already cover your category. Be open about who you are when you take part.

Step 10: Re-run the audit

After changes, repeat Steps 2 to 4 with the same questions, and compare. Change takes time to show, and results will move around, so look for a sustained shift over several weeks, not a single good day.

Doing this by hand or with a tool

A spreadsheet is enough for your first audit, and doing it manually is a good way to understand how the answers behave. The work grows quickly once you add more questions, more assistants and more competitors. At that point a dedicated tool saves time. Options include Profound, Peec AI, AthenaHQ and Otterly.ai, and Ripplix which tracks mentions, share of voice and citations across the major assistants and compares your pages with the ones that were cited.


What an audit cannot tell you

Visibility is a signal, not a sale. Appearing in an answer does not prove it influenced a purchase, so pair your findings with referral traffic and conversion data. And because answers vary, your numbers are a sample. Look at trends over time, and do not read too much into small changes.

A one-page summary

1. List 20 to 30 buyer questions.
2. Run them across several assistants.
3. Repeat at least three times.
4. Record mention, position, tone and sources.
5. Find the patterns, especially repeated sources.
6. Compare your pages with the cited ones.
7. Improve the content you own.
8. Check that machines can read your site.
9. Earn accurate mentions on outside sources.
10. Re-run and compare.

The first audit is rarely flattering, but it replaces guessing with a baseline, and a baseline is what makes every later improvement measurable.