AI visibility audit: does ChatGPT know your business?

What the audit answers

A buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google for "the best accountant for a small exporter in Gurgaon" and gets a short list. The audit answers four questions about that moment:

1. Can the engines reach you? Each one uses a search crawler, and a blocked or unreadable site cannot be used as a source.
2. Do they name you? Measured by running the questions your buyers ask, many times, and counting.
3. What are they reading when they answer? The pages each tool cites for your category, and whether you are on them.
4. What would change the result, in what order? A list of fixes, each marked with the evidence behind it.

It is the first step of WavX's generative engine optimisation service, and it is also sold on its own.

What is checked

The crawler names and what each one is for are listed in the AI crawler directory.

How to check your own visibility by hand

None of this needs a paid tool. Allow two to three hours.

1. Write ten prompts in a buyer's words. Three that name your category and place ("best physiotherapy clinic in Sector 56 Gurgaon"), three that describe a problem ("my Shopify orders are not reaching Tally, who can fix it"), two that compare you with a named competitor, and two that name you ("what is [your business]", "is [your business] reliable").
2. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. Start a new conversation for every run, so that an earlier answer does not shape the next one. Where a tool offers web search as an option, ask it to search.
3. Run each prompt at least five times per tool. Five is the least that shows the variation. The SparkToro authors suggest dozens to hundreds of runs before treating the figure as a metric.
4. Record four things per run: did your business appear, how was it described, which competitors appeared, and which sources were linked.
5. Count the share of runs in which you appear. That percentage is the number to keep. Ignore the order of the list.
6. Open the sources the tools linked. They are the pages the answer was built from: directories, review sites, comparison articles, sometimes a competitor's own page. Note the ones your business is absent from.
7. Read your robots.txt at yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for Disallow rules against the search crawlers in the table above.
8. Open Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. In Search Console, look for the generative AI performance report and check under Settings that Search generative AI is set to include your site. In Bing Webmaster Tools, open AI Performance.

If step 5 gives zero across every tool, the troubleshooting guide lists the causes in order of likelihood.

Why two runs give two answers

Generated answers are written afresh each time, and the engines say so. Google's documentation notes that AI Overviews and AI Mode "may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary", and that AI Overviews often do not appear at all.

In January 2026 SparkToro and Gumshoe had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts through ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI features 2,961 times. For ChatGPT and Google's AI, the chance of the same list of brands appearing in any two of a hundred responses was under 1 in 100, and Claude was only slightly more consistent. The same list in the same order came up roughly once in 1,000 runs. The authors, who describe themselves as not being professional researchers, concluded that position in the list is meaningless and that the share of runs in which a brand appears is a reasonable measure.

The audit therefore reports frequencies, with the date, the tool and the number of runs beside every figure.

What the evidence says changes visibility

This field is full of confident advice. The table sets out what has been published, and how strong each piece is.

Two conclusions follow. What other sites say about a business is associated with AI visibility far more strongly than anything on the business's own site. And the on-site work that has support is plain: be reachable, be indexed, and state sourced facts clearly. How AI answer engines choose sources goes through the mechanics.

What you receive

A written report, in plain language, in six parts.

Part 4 is often the most useful, because it names the actual directories, lists and review sites to work on.

What the audit cannot do

• It cannot promise a mention. No vendor controls what an engine generates. Google's own hiring guidance says no one can guarantee a first-place ranking, and the same holds for AI answers.
• It cannot show what your buyers typed. No engine publishes the questions people ask it. The nearest thing is Bing's report of a sample of the phrases its system used for retrieval. The prompt set is an informed sample.
• It cannot see inside the engines. Google states that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems. The audit measures outputs.
• Its numbers age. Models and indexes change. A prompt result is true for the date it was run.

When you should not buy one

• Your site is not in Google's index. Fix that first; the guide to a website that is not showing on Google covers it. AI visibility work on an unindexed site is premature.
• You already know the answer. If the business has no listings, no reviews and no mentions anywhere, the hand check above will show zero and the cause is not in doubt. Spend the money on getting listed and reviewed.
• You sell to people who do not ask AI tools. If your enquiries come from referrals and walk-ins, a technical SEO audit and a complete Google Business Profile will do more.

An audit is worth paying for when the hand check gives a mixed picture, when competitors appear and you do not, or when a developer is needed to find out why a crawler cannot read the site. Follow-up measurement is described under AI citation and referral tracking.