How to Audit Your AI Visibility in 30 Minutes

Before you can improve your AI visibility, you need to know what it looks like today. Most brands are operating blind — running campaigns and publishing content without ever checking how their brand is represented inside AI-generated answers.

This 30-minute audit gives you a clear baseline. You will need a browser, access to ChatGPT or Claude, and your Google Search Console login.

What you are measuring

AI visibility has two layers:

• Organic AI presence — does your brand get cited in AI answers without paid placement? (This is GEO territory.)
• Paid AI presence — do your ads appear in AI-generated result formats? (This is GEA territory.)

This audit covers both. Total time: around 30 minutes if you work through it systematically.

Part 1 — Check your organic AI presence (10 minutes)

Open ChatGPT (or Claude, or Perplexity). Run the following queries, replacing placeholders with your actual brand and category:

1. “What is the best [your product/service category] for [your target customer]?”
2. “Who are the leading [your category] providers?”
3. “What should I look for when choosing a [your product/service]?”
4. “Compare [your brand] with [main competitor]”
5. “Tell me about [your brand name]”

For each query, note:

• Is your brand mentioned? In what context?
• Are competitors mentioned? Which ones?
• What sources does the AI cite?
• Is the information about your brand accurate and up to date?

Do not run just one query. AI responses vary. Run each query 2-3 times and note whether your brand appears consistently or only occasionally.

Part 2 — Check Google AI Overviews (10 minutes)

Open Google in an incognito window (to avoid personalisation). Search for:

1. Your primary category keyword (“best [your category]”)
2. Three to five questions your target customers ask
3. Your brand name
4. A competitor comparison query (“[competitor] vs [your brand]”)

For each search, note:

• Does an AI Overview appear?
• Is your brand mentioned or cited in the AI Overview?
• Do ads appear in the AI Overview? Are any of them yours?
• Which competitors appear in both the AI Overview and the paid placements?

Screenshot everything. You will want to compare against this baseline in three months.

Part 3 — Check Microsoft Copilot (5 minutes)

Open Bing and enable Copilot mode (the chat icon). Run two or three of the same queries you used in Part 2. Note whether your brand is mentioned, and whether ads appear in the Copilot response.

Part 4 — Google Search Console signals (5 minutes)

Log in to Google Search Console. Under Performance → Search Results:

• Filter by Search Type: Web
• Look at your top queries by impressions
• Identify which queries are informational or question-based — these are most likely to trigger AI Overviews
• Note your average position and CTR for these queries. Lower CTR on informational queries is often a sign that an AI Overview is answering the question before users reach your result.

What your results tell you

After the audit, you should have a clear picture across three scenarios:

You appear consistently and accurately: Your organic AI presence is in reasonable shape. Focus on strengthening it further and activating paid GEA channels.

You appear inconsistently or inaccurately: Your GEO foundation needs work — content restructuring, schema markup, and authoritative sourcing are the priority before paid GEA makes sense.

You do not appear at all: This is common, and it is fixable. Start with a GEO Foundation engagement to build organic AI presence before layering in paid placements.

Repeat this audit quarterly

AI visibility changes as platforms update their models, as competitors improve their GEO, and as you implement changes yourself. The 30-minute audit is most useful as a regular check — not a one-time exercise.

Set a quarterly reminder. Compare your results against the screenshots from the previous quarter. Track whether your brand appears more or less consistently, whether the citations are more or less accurate, and whether your paid placements are appearing in the right contexts.