AI Visibility Audit: Where You Actually Stand
An AI visibility audit is a one-off check of whether ChatGPT, Google's AI answers, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot can reach your website, describe your business correctly and link to it. We test it, write down what came back, and tell you what we would fix first. No subscription, and no promise of a citation from anyone.
What an AI visibility audit is, and who asks for one
A one-off diagnosis you can act on yourself, whoever ends up doing the work.
An AI visibility audit is a one-off check of how your business shows up when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation. We test ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Then we write down what came back, in plain English, along with what we would change first.
It is a diagnosis, so it stands on its own. You are not buying a subscription and you are not signing up for the fix work. Some clients take the report, hand it to their own developer and get on with it. That is a perfectly good outcome and we price it that way.
Who tends to ask for one
Usually one of three people. Someone who typed their own company name into ChatGPT and did not like the answer. Someone watching a competitor turn up in AI answers instead of them. Or a marketing lead who has been asked in a board meeting whether the company is "in AI yet", and would like a real answer rather than a shrug.
An SEO audit asks why you are not ranking. An AI visibility audit asks something different: whether the systems that write the answer can fetch your pages, understand who you are, and link to you when the question matches what you sell. Those are related jobs, but they are not the same job.
One honest caveat before you read further. If the site is brand new, or Google has barely indexed it, a technical SEO audit will tell you more for the same money. We would rather say that than sell you the wrong report.
First check: can their crawlers actually reach you?
Assistants only cite pages they are allowed to fetch, so this is where every audit should start.
The first thing an AI visibility audit checks is your robots.txt file, line by line, against the crawler names the AI companies publish themselves. It takes minutes, and it is the check most generic audits never mention.
Here is the part most site owners have never been told. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity each run separate bots for two separate jobs. One set collects content that may train future models. A different set fetches pages live, at the moment somebody asks a question, so the assistant can answer and link to the source.
Training bots and retrieval bots are not the same bots
- Training: GPTBot from OpenAI, ClaudeBot from Anthropic.
- Retrieval: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User from OpenAI, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot from Anthropic, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User from Perplexity.
The operators say this themselves. OpenAI's bot documentation describes OAI-SearchBot as "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT" and states it is not used to train the models. Anthropic's crawler notice draws the same line, with Claude-User fetching a page only when a user's question needs it. Perplexity's crawler docs say PerplexityBot exists to "surface and link websites" and is not used for foundation model training.
So this is not an all-or-nothing decision. Block GPTBot and ClaudeBot, and your content stays out of training while your pages can still be fetched and cited. Block the retrieval bots instead and you vanish from the answers. We see that second mistake regularly, usually made years ago by somebody who meant well and has not looked since. It is the cheapest thing an AI visibility audit ever finds, and the most expensive one to leave alone.
Google works differently, and most audits get it wrong
Blocking Google-Extended does not keep you out of AI Overviews. Google says so itself.
Google is not built like the others, and this is where a lot of AI advice falls over. There is no separate Google crawler for AI answers. Googlebot does all the fetching, exactly as it always has.
Google-Extended is not a crawler at all. It is a token you can name in robots.txt, and it gates two narrow downstream uses of content Googlebot has already collected: training future Gemini models, and grounding in Gemini Apps and the Vertex AI API. Google introduced it in its 2023 update on web publisher controls as a way to manage those products specifically.
So the popular advice is simply false
"Block Google-Extended to stay out of AI Overviews" does not work, and it never did. Google's own Search documentation on AI features in Google Search puts it plainly: AI "is built into Search and integral to how Search functions, which is why robots.txt directives for Googlebot is the control for site owners to manage access to how their sites are crawled for Search." Google-Extended is offered separately, to "limit AI training and grounding in some of Google's other systems".
Read that carefully, because the practical consequences are large. AI Overviews and AI Mode run on ordinary Googlebot and the Search index. Google-Extended can sit at disallow without changing them at all. If you genuinely want out of AI Overviews, the levers are the Search ones, which means Googlebot's robots.txt rules and snippet controls such as nosnippet. Those cost you ordinary search traffic too, so it is rarely a trade worth making.
Every AI visibility audit we run checks that setting. We tell you what it is doing today, and whether it matches the decision you thought you had made. Often nobody at the company knew the line was there.
What else an AI visibility audit looks at
Access is the floor. The rest is whether there is anything worth quoting once a bot arrives.
Once we know the crawlers can reach you, the AI visibility audit moves on to four more checks. Each one answers a question you can act on.
- Do the pages that answer buying questions exist at all? Prices, comparisons, how the service works, who it suits and who it does not. Assistants field those questions constantly. If your website never answers them, there is nothing on it to quote.
- Structured data. We check whether your organisation, services, people and reviews are marked up, and whether the markup agrees with what a human reads on the page. Mismatches between the two are common, and they cost trust rather than earn it.
- Are your facts the same everywhere? Company name, address, phone number, opening hours, service names. An assistant reads your site, your Google Business Profile, directories and other people's mentions of you. Where those disagree, the model has to pick, and it may pick wrong.
- A baseline measurement. We run a set of real buying prompts, several times each, and log which businesses get named and which get linked. That is your starting line, in writing, with dates on it.
Named and linked are two different results
A mention is your brand appearing in the answer text. A citation is a source link a reader can click, and only the second one sends anyone to your website. We report them separately, because they lead to different work.
On the technical half, our published teardown of Bupa's website is the clearest example of how we look at a site. It is the one piece of audit work we have put in public, so you can judge the standard before you pay us anything.
How the audit runs, and what lands in your inbox
About five working days, and a report written for a human being.
An AI visibility audit takes about five working days once we have your website address and the list of services you want enquiries for. Most of that time goes on running prompts repeatedly, because AI answers move. Ask the same question twice and you can get two different sets of sources.
What you actually receive
A written report, not a dashboard export. It quotes the answers we saw, with the date and the assistant that produced each one. Robots.txt findings come as the exact lines to change, so a developer can act in ten minutes. It lists the missing pages, ranked by how often the matching question came up while we were testing.
After that comes a short section on what we would do first, second and third if the site were ours. You can hand the whole thing to somebody else and it will still make sense. Nothing in it is written so that only we can read it.
We include the prompt set as well, so you can rerun the same questions in six months and see whether anything moved. That works whether or not you ever hire us. If you would rather not do it by hand, LLM visibility tracking is the ongoing version of the same measurement.
Agree the prompts
Twenty to forty real buying questions, in the words your customers use, plus your brand name and the competitors you care about. You approve the list before we run anything.
Test and check
We run every prompt across the assistants and log what came back. In parallel we go through robots.txt, structured data and your business facts wherever they appear online.
Report and talk it through
You get the written report, then a call where we walk through it and you ask whatever you like. There is no sales script waiting at the end of that call.
What an AI visibility audit costs and how long it takes
No published single figure, and a straight explanation of why not.
We do not publish one price for an AI visibility audit, and it is worth saying why rather than leaving you to guess. The cost depends on how many prompts are worth testing and how many places your business facts live. A single-site practice is a much smaller job than a group with eleven branches and four legacy websites.
So the process is short. Send the address, tell us what you sell, and we come back with a fixed price and a delivery date. That costs nothing and it does not need a phone call first. Five working days is the usual turnaround once the prompt list is agreed.
What the rest of the market charges
Other UK agencies advertise one-off AI audits at somewhere between roughly £150 and £1,000. We took that range from their search listings rather than reading each page, so treat it as a rough guide rather than a verified figure. It still tells you something useful. At the bottom of that range nobody is running prompts by hand, and at the top they certainly should be.
If you want the fix work as well
Our ongoing SEO starts at £495 a month, rolling monthly, with no lock-in and no minimum term to sign. Where clients take both, the audit sits at the front of that work rather than being billed twice. Our guide to how much SEO costs in the UK covers the wider market if you are comparing quotes from several agencies.
What the audit cannot tell you
Three limits worth knowing before you spend anything.
An AI visibility audit tells you where you stand today. It cannot tell you where you will stand next month, and it cannot promise you a citation.
First, the answers move. Two identical questions minutes apart can return different sources, so a single test proves very little. That is exactly why we sample every prompt repeatedly instead of screenshotting one good answer.
Second, we can see what an assistant said, but not why it chose one source over another. Nobody outside those companies can. Anyone selling you a formula for that is guessing in public.
Third, this is a diagnosis and not a repair. Fixing what the audit finds is separate work, and some of it lands on your developer rather than on us. We will tell you which parts, and roughly how long each should take.
What usually happens next
An AI visibility audit is useful on its own, even if you stop there. Some clients read the report and do the work themselves, which we are genuinely fine with. A few take the measurement side only. Others hand over the lot, which is AI search optimisation and the month-to-month work an AI SEO agency does. If you want the terminology explained before deciding anything, generative engine optimisation is the plain-English version of the same subject.
We will not promise you a citation
No agency can make ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI answers name your business. Anyone guaranteeing it is guessing. We report what we find, we tell you what we would change, and we leave the promises to somebody else.
Related: AI search optimisation · LLM visibility tracking · Generative engine optimisation · Technical SEO audit
Fair questions about the audit
The things people ask us before they book one.
What is an AI visibility audit?
An AI visibility audit is a one-off check of whether AI assistants can find, understand and cite your business. We test ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, check your robots.txt and structured data, and report what we found in writing.
How much does an AI visibility audit cost?
We price each one after seeing the site, because the number of prompts worth testing varies a lot. Send us the address and we come back with a fixed price and a date, at no cost. If you want the ongoing fix work too, our SEO starts at £495 a month, rolling monthly, with no lock-in.
How is this different from a normal SEO audit?
An SEO audit asks why you are not ranking in Google's ordinary results. An AI visibility audit asks whether AI assistants can reach your pages, whether your facts are consistent everywhere they read them, and whether you get named or linked in generated answers. A site can rank well and still be invisible in AI answers.
More questions about the AI visibility audit
Which AI platforms do you check?
ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. If your buyers use something else, tell us and we will add it to the prompt set.
Should we block Google-Extended to stay out of AI Overviews?
It will not achieve that. Google-Extended is a robots.txt token covering future Gemini training and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. Google's own documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode run on standard Googlebot and Search index data, so disallowing Google-Extended does not affect them.
How long does the audit take?
About five working days once we have your website address and your list of services. Most of that time goes on running the prompts repeatedly, because AI answers vary between identical questions.
Will the audit guarantee we get cited by ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews?
No, and neither can anybody else. The audit tells you where you stand and what is currently in the way. The work after it has an honest chance attached to it, not a promise.
Find out where you actually stand
Send the website address and the services you want enquiries for. We will come back with what the AI visibility audit covers, a fixed price and a date. That part costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Raoul (Alex) Müller
Email: office@digitalmovement.uk
Phone: +44 7865 064463