What Is an AI Visibility Audit and How Can You Check If Your Website Appears in ChatGPT or Gemini?

TL;DR

An AI visibility audit checks whether your website is being mentioned or cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity when people ask questions in your niche.

You can:

• Do a quick manual check by running realistic prompts in ChatGPT/Gemini and seeing if your brand appears
  
• Or run an automated AI visibility audit using a specialist tool (like SiteSignal) that tests many prompts across models, tracks trends, and flags what’s holding you back (schema, structure, authority, etc.)
  

If you’re serious about organic visibility in 2025, you can’t just ask “Am I ranking on Google?”
You also need to ask: “Am I part of the answers AI tools are giving?”

Why AI Visibility Matters More Than Ever

Search is shifting from “10 blue links” to conversational answers.

Millions of people now ask tools like:

• ChatGPT
  
• Google’s Gemini
  
• Claude
  
• Perplexity
  

for:

• “Best tools for [problem]”
  
• “Which companies can help with [task]?”
  
• “Top providers for [industry]?”
  

If your website never shows up in those answers:

• You’re missing a new discovery channel
  
• Competitors can become the “default” recommendation
  
• Buyers may trust and choose them before they even see your site
  

An AI visibility audit tells you where you stand:

• Are you being mentioned?
  
• In which models?
  
• For which types of queries?
  
• And if not, what’s blocking you?
  

What Is an AI Visibility Audit?

An AI visibility audit measures how visible your brand or website is inside AI-generated responses, not just search engine result pages.

Think of it as an SEO audit for the AI era:

Instead of only checking where you rank in Google, you check:

The goal isn’t just “appear somewhere once.”
The goal is to become eligible and preferred when AI assistants choose which brands to include in their answers.

How Does an AI Visibility Audit Work?

Here’s a simplified breakdown of how a structured audit typically runs (manually or using a tool like SiteSignal’s Brand Radar):

1. Prompt Set Creation

You start by defining realistic questions your audience might ask AI tools, for example:

• “Best web design companies in Sri Lanka”
  
• “Top website uptime monitoring tools”
  
• “Affordable SEO audit platforms for agencies”
  

These prompts cover:

• Awareness queries (best tools, top platforms, etc.)
  
• Consideration queries (alternatives, vs, comparisons)
  
• Niche or local queries (in [country/city], for [industry])
  

2. AI Response Collection

Those prompts are then run across major AI assistants:

• ChatGPT
  
• Gemini
  
• Claude
  
• Perplexity
  

This can be:

• Done manually (slow, but simple), or
  
• Automated by a tool that queries multiple models on a schedule
  

3. Mention Detection

Each AI response is scanned for:

• Your brand name
  
• Your domain (with and without www / https)
  
• Variants or common misspellings
  

The same scan can be run for competitors to see who AI prefers.

4. Visibility Scoring

Each prompt + model response is scored, for example:

• ✅ Visible – Brand is clearly mentioned by name or link
  
• ⚠️ Partially Visible – Brand is implied or mentioned in a weaker way
  
• ❌ Not Visible – Brand doesn’t appear at all
  

From this, you can calculate:

• Overall AI visibility score
  
• Visibility by model (ChatGPT vs Gemini etc.)
  
• Visibility by query type (generic vs branded vs local)
  

5. Trend & Gap Reporting

Finally, the audit highlights:

• Where you are visible (and competitive)
  
• Where you’re absent but should be present
  
• Which topics, query types, or models need work
  
• How your visibility compares to key competitors
  

That’s the point where you stop guessing and start fixing.

How to Check If Your Website Appears in ChatGPT or Gemini

You’ve got two practical options: manual or automated.

Option 1: Manual AI Visibility Check (Quick Test)

Use this as a baseline.

1. List 10–15 realistic prompts your ideal customers might ask, for example:
   
   • “Best tools for SEO audits”
     
   • “Top WordPress maintenance services”
     
   • “Who offers uptime monitoring for small business websites?”
     
2. Go to ChatGPT (with browsing/search enabled if available) and Gemini.
   
3. Run each prompt and look for:
   
   • Does your brand appear at all?
     
   • Are competitors mentioned instead?
     
   • How does AI describe them vs you (if you appear)?
     
4. Repeat a few days later to see if answers are stable or changing.
   

If you never show up across your most important prompts, you have an AI visibility problem, even if your SEO traffic looks fine.

Manual testing is:

• Good for understanding the problem
  
• Useful for spot checks
  
• Not great for long-term monitoring, especially if you’re tracking many prompts or brands
  

Option 2: Automated AI Visibility Audit (Using a Tool Like SiteSignal)

If you want consistent, multi-model tracking, you need automation.

An automated AI visibility tool (such as SiteSignal) will:

• Test a curated set of prompts daily or weekly
  
• Run them across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity
  
• Detect brand and competitor mentions automatically
  
• Score your visibility and show trends over time
  
• Highlight missing signals (schema, structure, performance) that may be holding you back
  

Typical outputs you’d see:

• “You appear in 4/20 key prompts in ChatGPT, 1/20 in Gemini, 0/20 in Perplexity”
  
• “Competitor A appears in 15/20 prompts in Gemini and 12/20 in ChatGPT”
  
• “Pages most often referenced: /pricing, /solutions/ai-visibility, /blog/[X]”
  

This turns a messy, manual process into:

• A dashboard metric you can track
  
• A report you can show clients or stakeholders
  
• A feedback loop for your content and technical improvements
  

What Makes a Website More “AI-Visible”?

AI systems prefer content that is:

• Clear – Easy to understand, with straightforward language
  
• Structured – Headings, sections, and logical layout
  
• Trustworthy – Factual, consistent, and not exaggerated
  
• Machine-readable – Schema, metadata, and clean HTML
  

If you want to improve your odds of being cited by ChatGPT or Gemini:

1. Use descriptive titles and H1s
   
   • “Website Uptime Monitoring for Agencies” beats “Solutions”
     
2. Add FAQ sections on key pages
   
   • Use natural-language questions and concise, direct answers
     
3. Implement schema markup, especially:
   
   • FAQPage, Article, Organization, Product/Service
     
4. Keep your site fast and stable
   
   • Slow, unstable sites are weaker candidates for recommendations
     
5. Write factual, specific content
   
   • Include concrete details instead of vague claims
     

The clearer and more structured your content, the easier it is for AI systems to understand who you are, what you do, and when to recommend you.

Common Mistakes That Kill AI Visibility

A lot of sites fail AI visibility audits because of avoidable issues:

• Only watching Google rankings and ignoring AI search
  
• Filling pages with vague marketing fluff instead of real answers
  
• Publishing content with no clear headings or structure
  
• Hiding key information inside images, sliders, or tabs
  
• Letting important pages go stale for years
  

Fixing these doesn’t guarantee instant AI mentions but leaving them unfixed almost guarantees you’ll be ignored.

Quick Q&A: AI Visibility vs SEO

Q: How is AI visibility different from SEO visibility?
A: SEO tracks where you appear in search results.
AI visibility tracks whether tools like ChatGPT or Gemini mention your brand in their answers when users ask questions about your category. They’re related but not the same.

Q: Can I improve AI visibility without buying ads?
A: Yes. Ads don’t control what AI assistants say. Clear content, strong structure, schema, and consistent brand signals matter much more than ad spend here.

Q: How often should I check my AI visibility?
A: At least monthly as a baseline. If AI visibility is critical to your funnel or you’re in a competitive niche, weekly tracking gives you much better signal on changes.

In Short

An AI visibility audit tells you:

• Whether AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini know your brand exists
  
• How often you appear compared to competitors
  
• What’s blocking you from being included more often
  

Search is becoming conversational.
Being “visible” no longer means just “ranking in Google” it means being part of the answer when someone asks an AI tool for help.

If you want to stop guessing and start measuring:

• Do a manual check today with 10–15 realistic prompts
  
• Then consider using an automated AI visibility audit (such as SiteSignal) if you need continuous tracking, competitor comparison, and clear technical recommendations
  

That’s how you move from “I hope AI mentions us” to “We know exactly where we stand, and what to fix next.”