TL;DR. An AI visibility audit is a structured test of whether AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI name your business when buyers ask for the best option in your market. By the end of this project you can run the 10-prompt audit yourself, tonight, in about 45 minutes, and walk away with your share-of-voice number and the exact list of sources AI trusts in your market.
- Watch us run this AI visibility audit on ourselves (the receipts)
- What is AI visibility?
- What does an audit reveal in the real world?
- Why is the audit Step 1 of everything?
- How do you run the 10-prompt audit, step by step?
- How do you make the audit your own?
- How do you train someone else on this?
- Where do you share your result?
- Frequently asked questions
Watch us run this AI visibility audit on ourselves (the receipts)
This is Project 1 of 7 in the AI SEO playbook. Everything else in the curriculum depends on what you find here, which is why it goes first and why it is the shortest.
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is how often, and how prominently, AI engines name your business when someone asks them a buying question. It is the AI-era equivalent of a Google ranking, with one big difference: the AI does not show a list of ten links, it recommends one to three names. You are either in the answer or you do not exist for that buyer.
You cannot optimize what you cannot see. The audit makes the invisible problem visible: it tells you your current share of voice, names the competitor winning your questions, and hands you the list of pages the AI reads to make its picks.
What does an audit reveal in the real world?
A handcrafted home-sauna brand selling nationally came to us confident about their online presence. Their first scan: named in 17% of the answers their buyers were asking. The scan also named the one incumbent taking the rest, and listed the exact articles and threads the AI was reading to make that call. Before the audit they had no idea, because nothing about this problem shows up in your analytics. No missed call, no bounced visitor, nothing to notice.
The flip side: Advanced Recovery Cryo in Modesto ran the whole playbook starting from this same audit and became the answer ChatGPT gives first in its market, with the receipts in the full case study.
Why is the audit Step 1 of everything?
Because every later step spends effort, and the audit is what aims it. Step 5 (citations) works from the source list you save tonight. Step 6 (clusters) targets the topic you are losing worst. Step 7 (measurement) tracks the number you establish today. Think of it like a lab test before treatment: cheap, fast, and the only honest way to know what to fix.
Most of your competitors will never run this. Local AI visibility in 2026 is where Google was in 2010, and the audit is how you find the open ground first. If the term is new to you, how to check if ChatGPT recommends your business is the 30-second version; this project is the full method.
How do you run the 10-prompt audit, step by step?
Do this tonight. 45 minutes. Open ChatGPT and Perplexity, and ask each one these ten questions, filled in for your business:
- best [your category] in [your city]
- best [your category] near [your neighborhood]
- [your category] [your city] prices
- is [your main service] worth it
- [your main service] vs [the common alternative]
- where should I go for [the problem you solve] in [your city]
- [your category] with the best reviews in [your city]
- best [your category] for [your ideal customer] in [your city]
- [your business name] reviews
- who do locals recommend for [your service] in [your city]
For every answer, score four things and write them down:
| Score | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Were you named? | Your raw visibility |
| Named first? | Whether you are the recommendation or the alternate |
| Who was named instead? | Your real AI-era competitor (often not who you think) |
| What sources did the AI cite? | The roadmap: the pages you must get onto |
Save every cited link into one list. Your share of voice today = answers that named you, out of 10. Most local businesses score zero. If you were named first for your money question, congratulations: you are the incumbent this playbook teaches everyone else to attack. Defend it; the steps are the same.
We asked all 10 prompts about our own market (AI marketing agency, Austin, TX) on both engines, using our own product. Score: ChatGPT 2 of 10, Perplexity 1 of 10. Named on the niche money prompt ("best AI SEO agency for gyms and med spas in Austin") and on our brand, invisible on every broad local prompt.
The citation column told us why: for "best in Austin" and "who do locals recommend" questions, the engines read Google Maps and Business Profiles more than 30 times, and the agency winning the reviews prompt holds 327 Google reviews. Our own Google Business Profile is brand new: freshly verified, zero reviews yet. So Project 3 just became our to-do list, and the exact pages the engines cited became our Project 5 roadmap. That is the audit doing its job.
The receipts, with screenshots, live in our build-in-public thread on X, and this number gets tracked weekly on our own Breadchaser Analytics dashboard, the same one clients get.
How do you make the audit your own?
The ten prompts are generic on purpose. Your upgrade: add two prompts only your market would ask. The question you hear at your front desk every week, worded exactly how customers say it, and the objection that kills deals ("is [service] safe for [condition]?"). Those two prompts usually expose the gap no competitor is watching, and they become the seed of your content plan in Project 6.
Running this audit for a software company? The B2B SaaS upgrade swaps the city grammar for problem grammar and adds two scoring columns. Selling products? The eCommerce upgrade adds the shopping surfaces and the star-rating column.
How do you train someone else on this?
Run the audit WITH another business owner, on their business. You read the prompts, they score their own answers, then you compare source lists. Teaching the scoring is the fastest way to make it instinct, and their market's citation pattern will teach you something about yours. Bonus points for three: a peer, someone on your team, and a mentor who will challenge your scoring.
Where do you share your result?
Post the number. "I ran a 10-prompt AI visibility audit on my own business tonight. Score: 2 out of 10. Here is who AI recommends instead." That post is honest, it is interesting, and it starts your public before-and-after. Link back to this project so the next owner can run it, and tag us: we feature reader audits on the playbook.
Score yourself: a 50-prompt list that gets re-run on a schedule is +1 on the playbook's 0 to 5 AI-awareness score, and tonight's 10 prompts are the first fifth of it. Project 2 builds the other forty.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI visibility audit?
An AI visibility audit is a structured test of whether AI engines name your business when buyers ask purchase questions. You ask a fixed set of prompts on ChatGPT and Perplexity, score whether you were named, who was named instead, and which sources the AI cited, then track the results over time.
What is a good AI visibility score?
Most local businesses are named in zero of ten buyer prompts. Being named in 3 or more out of 10, with at least one first-position answer on a money question, puts you ahead of nearly every local competitor. The number matters less than its direction month over month.
How often should I re-run the audit?
Re-run a slice weekly and the full list monthly. AI engines re-synthesize their answers constantly, so a single snapshot is noise; the trend across 50 tracked prompts is the signal.
Is there a faster way than doing it by hand?
Yes. Our free AI Visibility Score is the machine-run version: 50 prompts across 3 AI engines, scored live, with the competitors and sources named. You keep the results either way.
Two ways to run this playbook. Get your free AI Visibility Score in about 30 seconds: the machine-run audit, your own live dashboard, plus a free 20-minute walkthrough with Matthew. Or get The Playbook and keep doing it yourself.
