Most brands don't know their AI visibility. Not because the information is unavailable — because they haven't checked. The audit doesn't require a specialist or a big budget to start. Here's how to do it yourself.
Step 1: ask the models directly
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. For each one, run three types of queries:
"What is [your brand]?" — tests whether the model has accurate, current information about you.
"[Category] tools for [your use case]" — tests category presence without prompting. Are you mentioned? Who is?
A question your ideal customer would ask when they need what you offer — the intent-driven query that should be sending people your way.
Record the results. Note what's accurate, what's missing, what's wrong. This is your baseline.
Step 2: read your homepage without context
Copy the first 200 words of your homepage and read them in isolation, pretending you know nothing about the company. Do they tell you what the product does and who it's for? Or are they mostly brand voice and aspiration?
If someone — or something — encountered those words without any surrounding context, what would they conclude? If the answer is "not much that's specific", that's a high-priority fix.
Step 3: check your content structure
For each of your most important pages, ask:
- Is there a direct answer to the user's likely question in the first paragraph?
- Do the headings reflect questions people actually ask, or internal section labels?
- Are lists and tables used for information that's inherently structured?
- Are claims specific and factual, or general and vague?
Step 4: audit your third-party footprint
Search your brand name in Google and note everything that isn't your own domain on the first two pages. Review platforms, editorial mentions, forum discussions, comparison articles.
Then search the category queries you care about — "best [tool] for [use case]" — and note which brands appear. If you're not in those results, you're not in the sources models retrieve from for those queries.
Step 5: test your pages in reader mode
Open your key pages in Firefox's reader mode or a similar tool that strips layout. Read what's left. If it's hard to follow without the visual design — if the content relies on formatting to make sense — a model extracting the raw text will struggle with it.
What to do with the findings
Rank gaps by effort versus impact. Rewriting the first paragraph of your homepage to be specific and direct: low effort, high impact. Building editorial coverage in niche publications: high effort, high compounding return. Technical fixes: finite, worth clearing.
Start with the homepage. It's the most-retrieved page and the most commonly wrong.
If you want a systematic baseline rather than a manual one — covering all four major models, with scored results you can track over time — the V-Score does this automatically. Run your free AI visibility audit here.