{ "version": "1.0", "updated": "2026-07-26", "filters": { "category": "", "audience": "", "service": "", "q": "" }, "count": 1, "categories": { "ai-visibility": { "label": "AI Visibility and Authority", "description": "Auditing and improving how search engines and AI assistants find, describe, trust, and cite a business." }, "business-systems": { "label": "Business Systems and Workflow", "description": "Mapping, governing, and modernizing the operating chain before automating any part of it." }, "ai-governance": { "label": "AI Use Cases and Governance", "description": "Scoping AI use cases, setting approval gates, and deciding what should and should not be automated." }, "leadership-decisions": { "label": "Leadership and Decision Support", "description": "Audits and frameworks leaders can run to decide where value is migrating and what to stop doing." } }, "audiences": { "executive": "Owner / Executive", "marketing": "Marketing / Growth", "operations": "Operations / Delivery", "technology": "Technology / Systems" }, "services": { "strategy": "Business Systems Strategy", "website": "Website / BXP", "content": "Authority Content", "ai-visibility": "AI Visibility / GEO", "ai": "Governed AI", "automation": "Workflow Automation", "data": "Data Architecture", "crm": "CRM / Revenue Operations", "reporting": "Reporting / Dashboards", "governance": "Governance" }, "evidence_standards": { "operational": "HCG runs this procedure in client engagements and the steps reflect repeated practice.", "active": "HCG applies this procedure in current work and continues to refine it.", "defined": "The procedure is specified and internally validated but has limited engagement history.", "concept": "The procedure is proposed and reasoned but not yet proven in delivery." }, "howtos": [ { "slug": "run-an-ai-visibility-audit", "howto_id": "HCG-HT-001", "title": "How to Run an AI Visibility Audit", "question": "How do I find out what AI assistants say about my business?", "direct_answer": "Ask the AI assistants your buyers use the questions your buyers actually ask, in a logged-out session, and record three things for every answer: whether you were named, which competitors were named instead, and which sources the system cited. The pattern across twenty or so questions is your AI visibility baseline. Most businesses discover they are absent from the questions that matter and present only for their own brand name.", "outcome": "A documented baseline showing how AI assistants describe your category, which companies they name, which sources they trust, and a prioritized fix list where every gap has an owner and a specific cause.", "category": "ai-visibility", "audiences": [ "executive", "marketing" ], "services": [ "ai-visibility", "content", "strategy" ], "intents": [ "audit-ai-visibility", "diagnose-visibility-gap", "measure-baseline" ], "keywords": [ "AI visibility audit", "how to check what ChatGPT says about my business", "GEO audit", "generative engine optimization audit", "AI search visibility", "brand citations audit", "AI Overviews visibility" ], "difficulty": "Foundational", "time_required": "PT4H", "time_required_label": "About three to four hours for the first pass", "cost": "No paid tools required", "who_should_do_this": "A marketing lead, owner, or anyone who can describe how buyers talk about the problem you solve. No technical skill is required.", "do_not_start_until": [ "Your website has real service pages that explain what you do, who you serve, and what evidence supports it. Auditing before that documents an absence you can already predict.", "Your Google Business Profile and primary directory listings are claimed and accurate. Inconsistent public business data will distort every result you record.", "You can name at least five competitors. Without them, you cannot tell absence from a category that no one owns yet." ], "tools_needed": [ "A spreadsheet", "Access to at least three AI assistants — for example ChatGPT, Google AI Mode or AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude, or Copilot", "A private or logged-out browser session" ], "intro_file": "howtos/run-an-ai-visibility-audit.html", "steps": [ { "name": "Write the questions your buyers actually ask", "detail": [ "Draft fifteen to twenty-five questions in the language a buyer would use before they know your company exists. Do not use your brand name in any of them yet.", "Cover four question types. Category questions define the space: \"what does a business systems consultant do.\" Comparison questions force a shortlist: \"best partner for a hospitality FF&E project.\" Local or regional questions test proximity weighting: \"AI consulting firms in Virginia.\" Problem-first questions capture the buyer before they know the category: \"our CRM and accounting data do not match, who fixes that.\"", "Pull the wording from real sources where you can — sales calls, inbound emails, support tickets, and the questions prospects ask in first meetings. Invented phrasing produces invented results." ], "check": "You have at least fifteen distinct questions and none of them contain your company name. If you cannot reach fifteen without repeating yourself, that difficulty is your first finding: the buyer's language has not been documented." }, { "name": "Run every question in a logged-out session", "detail": [ "Use a private window, signed out of every account, for all three or more assistants. Personalization and account history will show you a friendlier answer than a stranger receives, which is the answer that actually matters.", "Run the identical question wording across every assistant so results stay comparable. Do not refine a prompt because the first answer disappointed you.", "Assistants vary their phrasing between runs. Record the first answer you receive and move on rather than re-rolling for a better one." ], "check": "Every question has been asked of every assistant, from a session with no account history, using identical wording." }, { "name": "Record the answer, the names, and the sources", "detail": [ "Build one spreadsheet row per question and assistant, with columns for: the question, the assistant, whether your business was named, every other company named, every source cited with its URL, and how the assistant described the category.", "Paste the answer verbatim. Summarizing loses the exact language the system used, and that language is what you will later need to match or correct.", "The cited sources matter more than the verdict. They tell you which publications, directories, review platforms, and competitors the system currently treats as authoritative in your category." ], "check": "You can sort the spreadsheet by cited source and see which handful of domains shape most of the answers in your category." }, { "name": "Now ask the brand-name questions", "detail": [ "Only after the unbranded pass, ask directly: \"What does [company] do?\", \"Who does [company] serve?\", \"Is [company] credible?\", and \"What is [company] known for?\"", "Look for four failure types: descriptions that are simply wrong, descriptions that are years out of date, descriptions so generic they would fit any competitor, and hedged answers where the assistant signals it lacks confidence.", "A hedge is a finding, not a neutral result. It means the system could not corroborate you well enough to speak plainly." ], "check": "You have the machine's own description of your business, in its words, from three or more systems." }, { "name": "Trace every cited source to its type", "detail": [ "Classify each source you recorded: your own website, a directory, a review platform, a trade publication, a competitor's site, or an unrelated third party.", "Count how often your own domain appears versus everything else. In most first audits it is a small minority, which is the point.", "Where competitors are cited, open the specific page. You are looking for the structural reason it was selected — a direct answer near the top, a comparison table, a methodology page, published evidence — not for its design." ], "check": "You have a ranked list of the sources shaping your category's answers, and you have read the specific competitor pages the assistants chose." }, { "name": "Score every question into one of four states", "detail": [ "Absent: you were never mentioned. Misrepresented: you were named but described wrongly or with stale information. Generic: you were named with language that would fit any competitor. Cited: you were named and your own content was the source.", "Count each state. Those four numbers are your baseline, and they are the figures you will compare against next quarter.", "Score by question type as well. Being cited on branded questions while absent on problem-first questions is the most common pattern, and it means you are visible only to people who already know you." ], "check": "Four counts, plus a breakdown by question type, recorded with today's date." }, { "name": "Convert each state into a specific cause and owner", "detail": [ "Absent means you have published nothing that answers that question. The fix is content that resolves the buyer's intent, not more keywords.", "Misrepresented means an entity and consistency problem. Your description differs across your website, directories, profiles, and third-party mentions, so the system cannot settle on one account of you.", "Generic means a positioning and proof problem. The system can identify you but has no basis to distinguish you, usually because your claims carry no published evidence.", "Cited means protect and extend. Note what made that page work and apply the same structure to adjacent questions.", "Assign one named owner and one next action per finding. A finding with no owner will still be a finding at the next audit." ], "check": "Every gap maps to one of the four causes, one owner, and one action — with no item left as a general instruction to improve the website." }, { "name": "Set the re-run date before you close the file", "detail": [ "This is a baseline, not a project. Re-run the same question set quarterly, without changing the wording, so the comparison stays valid.", "Add new questions in a separate section rather than editing existing ones. Changing the question set breaks the trend line you are trying to build.", "Record the date of every run. When traffic or lead quality shifts, this becomes the only record you have of whether your representation in AI answers moved with it." ], "check": "A dated baseline file and a calendar entry for the next run, using a question set that will not be edited in between." } ], "common_mistakes": [ { "mistake": "Auditing while logged in to your accounts", "why_it_matters": "Personalization and history bias the answer toward what you have already engaged with. You will record a result no prospective buyer would ever see." }, { "mistake": "Asking only brand-name questions", "why_it_matters": "Assistants describe named companies reasonably well. Your buyers do not start with your name, so a branded-only audit reliably produces a comfortable and useless result." }, { "mistake": "Treating one assistant as the market", "why_it_matters": "Retrieval, source weighting, and citation behavior differ substantially between systems. A single-system audit measures one product's preferences rather than your visibility." }, { "mistake": "Recording the verdict but not the cited sources", "why_it_matters": "Whether you were named is the symptom. Which sources the system trusts is the cause, and it is the only part of the record that tells you where to act." }, { "mistake": "Re-rolling prompts until the answer improves", "why_it_matters": "Refining wording until you appear measures your prompting skill, not your visibility. Record the first answer to the buyer's real question." }, { "mistake": "Running the audit once", "why_it_matters": "Model updates, competitor publishing, and source changes move these answers continuously. A single run has no trend line and cannot show whether any fix worked." } ], "what_good_looks_like": [ "Fifteen to twenty-five unbranded questions drawn from real buyer language, run across three or more assistants", "Verbatim answers recorded, not summaries", "A ranked list of the sources that shape answers in your category", "Four state counts — absent, misrepresented, generic, cited — broken down by question type", "Every gap traced to one of four causes, with a named owner and a specific action", "A dated baseline and a scheduled re-run using an unedited question set" ], "evidence_standard": "operational", "related_articles": [ "end-of-seo-future-of-geo", "seo-2026-brand-citations-ai-perception", "business-relevance-orchestrating-outcomes" ], "related_faqs": [ "how-measure-ai-visibility", "how-ai-systems-understand-business", "what-is-ai-visibility", "can-ai-results-be-guaranteed" ], "related_howtos": [], "next_action": { "label": "Discuss what the audit surfaced", "route": "contact", "rationale": "Bring the four state counts and the source list. Those two artifacts are enough to identify whether the problem is content, entity consistency, positioning, or website structure." }, "seo_title": "How to Run an AI Visibility Audit | HCG", "meta_description": "A step-by-step audit of how ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, and other assistants describe your business — with verification checks, failure modes, and a fix list.", "date_published": "2026-07-26", "date_modified": "2026-07-26", "priority": 100, "featured": true } ] }