A real AI visibility audit shows you the exact questions it asked, which AI tools it asked, when it asked them and what the answers said. It tells you who was named instead of you, and it says plainly what the check cannot tell you. If all you get back is a score, you don't have enough to act on.
An AI visibility audit checks whether tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI answers bring up your business when a customer asks a question. PathOpt ran one on its own business on Oct 27, 2026, and our site had no answer to this exact question. This page is that answer: a checklist you can hold any audit against, including ours.
What should a real audit show me?
Hold any audit against these 11 items. Each one says why it matters and what a weak version looks like.
Why do the exact questions matter so much?
Wording can change who gets named. When we ran our free audit on three Dallas-area home service businesses on Nov 3, 2026, two wordings of the same hiring question named one of them in 0 of 3 answers and in 3 of 3. How to check whether AI search mentions your business walks through that test.
Ask where the questions came from. In PathOpt's audit, we picked 24 questions an owner might ask: 7 from a database of real ChatGPT questions and 17 we wrote. Questions we wrote don't prove how often anyone asks them.
What's the difference between being named and being linked?
Being named means the answer says your business name. Being linked means it includes a link to your website. A good audit tracks both.
Ask for at least one question that names your business. In our four checks (PathOpt's own and three test runs), the tools found each business when asked by name but mostly not when a customer asked a general question. The full results of our own audit show the counts.
Google's Search Console, its free tool for site owners, has a Generative AI performance report. It counts how often links to your site showed in Google's AI features, but not the questions, the answers, name-only mentions or who else was named.
How should an audit check whether AI tools can read my site?
It should check your robots.txt file, a short file on your website that tells automated visitors which pages they may read. Google's guide, "AI features and your website," lists allowing crawling in robots.txt and by your hosting setup as a basic step, and OpenAI and Perplexity each publish the names of their visitors. Our article on why AI answers recommend your competitors covers the full checks.
What did our own audit show for this exact question?
PathOpt asked "What should a small-business AI visibility audit include?" 3 times on each of 6 AI tools: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode (Google's AI answers for more complex questions), Google AI Overviews (the AI summary at the top of Google results), Claude and Perplexity. For Claude and Perplexity, we used the versions other software uses, not the apps. None of the 18 answers mentioned or linked to PathOpt.
On Perplexity, all 3 answers linked to the same guide from another agency. That guide listed what an audit checks: the business's basic facts, whether AI tools can read its pages and what AI answers say about it.
Our SEO page (search engine optimization, or getting found in search) said we help with AI search, but not what we check or what an owner gets back. Asked about PathOpt by name, Perplexity linked to that page in all 3 answers. It could find the page. The page just didn't answer the question.
We can't see why the AI tools chose other sources. We can only see what they chose.
Across all 24 customer questions, PathOpt came up in 0 of 430 answers. We haven't shown a lift yet. We'll recheck the same questions and publish the result, even if nothing changed.
What does our free audit cover, and what does it skip?
You send your website address, business name and email. We read your site, pull out your services and the cities you serve, and turn those into customer questions. We add up to 3 matching real questions people asked ChatGPT, plus one question that names your business.
We ask each question once on ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Perplexity, all on one day. AI Overviews don't appear for every question, so each one gets 3 or 4 answers. For each answer, we record whether you were named, whether your site was linked and who was named instead.
We also check your Google Business Profile: whether it exists, its category, rating and review count, and whether its name and phone match your website.
The report lists every question we asked and how often you came up for each one, the businesses and sites that showed up instead, what we found on your Google profile, and one thing to fix first. It doesn't include the full text of each answer. A person reads every report before it goes out, and a call is offered, never required.
Measured against the checklist above, the free audit skips two of these checks and only partly covers three more (items 2, 4 and 7). It doesn't check whether AI tools can read your site. It doesn't check the facts AI tools repeat about you. To check whether AI tools can read your site, start with the robots.txt section above.
It is also a snapshot: each question is asked once, on one day. Its report gives one count per question for answers that named or linked you, not the two separately, and it doesn't say which version of each tool answered. It checks whether your site answers each question, but the report doesn't show that result for each question. It also doesn't include the full text of each answer, even though the top of this page sets that as a standard.
Paid work adds checks on several dates, a larger question set built with your customers' real language, deeper looks at competitors and doing the fixes. Clients start on a standard monthly retainer. At month 6, we can talk about moving to a performance plan.
What are the red flags?
Judge our free report by the questions and sites it lists.
To check on your own, see how to check whether AI search mentions your business. If you already pay for this work, see how to tell if AI search optimization is working.
What this can and cannot tell you
This checklist tells you what to ask for. Our examples come from our audit on Oct 27, 2026, and three test runs on Nov 3, 2026. AI answers change, so those results describe those days only. Our free audit also checks only the services named on your site, so anything your site never mentions gets no question.
Facts on this page last checked Nov 11, 2026.
