Your first AI visibility audit
A practical walkthrough, from one URL to a clear picture of where you stand in AI answers.
Step 1: Pick the questions that matter
Start with how buyers ask. List 15 to 30 real questions in your category: "best tool for…" discovery questions, "alternatives to [competitor]" comparisons, and high-intent "which X is best for Y" questions. Being named in these answers affects revenue.
Step 2: Read the answers on each engine
Run those questions on the major engines, because the same question can produce a different winner on each one. For every answer, note whether you are mentioned, whether you are recommended or only listed, and who gets named instead.
Step 3: Trace the sources
Where a competitor wins, look at what the engine cited. You will usually see the same few review sites or comparison pages come up again and again. Those are your citation targets.
Step 4: Pick three moves
Don't try to fix everything. Pick the three changes likely to have the most impact, usually a mix of a comparison page to publish, a citation to earn and a technical gap to close. Ship those, then run the questions again and measure the change.
How to write a question worth tracking
Track the questions a buyer would type, not the ones you wish they would. "Best project management tool for a small agency" is a real question. "Leading enterprise workflow orchestration platform" is a positioning statement with a question mark, and nobody asks it. Check three things: would a stranger type this, would the answer name several brands, and would being named change whether someone buys? If any answer is no, drop the question. A question nobody asks costs as much to track as one that matters.
How many, and how often
Fifteen to thirty questions is enough to see a pattern in most categories. Each asking is one observation, and a mention rate built from a handful of observations has a margin too wide to tell good news from bad. Ask the same set repeatedly instead of adding more questions. Thirty questions asked every day tell you far more than three hundred asked once, because only repeated asking gives you a rate you can trust and a baseline to compare against.
What to write down
For each answer, record four things: whether you were named, whether you were recommended or only listed, which brands were named instead, and which sources the engine cited. People often skip the last one, but it is the one that tells you what to do. A missing mention tells you there is a problem, and the cited source tells you where it is.
A shortcut
Brand Climb automates steps one to three from a single URL and gives you step four as a ranked plan. Seeing your score is free and needs no card. The method also works in a spreadsheet, as long as you ask the same questions repeatedly and write down the sources.