AI Visibility Audit Tool: How to Run the Four-Part Audit

An AI visibility audit answers four questions in order: can the AI engines reach your pages, do they mention and cite you for your buyers' questions, which sources do they cite instead, and is what they say about you correct. Do them in that order, because an access problem makes every later finding meaningless. For an AI visibility audit tool that covers all four parts on seven engines, our pick is Cituna: a free crawler check for access, then ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode checked daily from $39 a month, with the pages each engine cited and a ranked fix list. Otterly.AI's $29 Lite covers Microsoft Copilot with a GEO audit, and Ahrefs' free checker gives a one-day snapshot of six engines.

What does an AI visibility audit cover?

What is AI visibility? defines the term if your team needs a shared starting point.

How do you check that AI engines can reach your site?

Start with robots.txt. Each company documents its own agents, and a rule meant for one can block another.

Then check the layers robots.txt does not cover:

1. Firewall and CDN. OpenAI and Perplexity publish their crawler IP ranges and recommend allowing them, and Perplexity gives firewall rule recipes. Anthropic warns that blocking its IP addresses may not work reliably. Ask whoever runs your bot protection to confirm these agents get through.
2. Rendering. Fetch your key pages without running JavaScript and look for the facts that matter: prices, product names, the answer to the page's question. Google asks that important content be available as text, and Bing advises against hiding critical content behind client-side rendering. The test of nine pricing pages read the way an AI crawler reads them shows what this looks like in practice.
3. Google's AI setting. In Search Console, open Settings, then Search generative AI, and confirm your site is included. Excluding it removes you from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features.
4. Bing's meta tags. Bing says NOARCHIVE keeps content out of Copilot responses and NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. Search your templates for both.

How to set up robots.txt for AI crawlers has the rule syntax.

How do you check whether engines mention and cite you?

1. Write 15 to 30 buyer questions, with two or three phrasings of each. How to choose the prompts to track covers selection.
2. Run every question on every engine that matters to you, in signed-out or memory-off sessions, several times over at least a week.
3. For each answer, record whether you are named, where in the answer, and whether any of your pages is cited.
4. Compute your presence rate per engine: answers that mention you divided by all answers. How to measure AI share of voice adds the competitor comparison.

How do you audit the sources engines cite?

This is where most of the fixable gaps turn up.

1. Collect every cited URL from the presence runs, and group them by site and by engine.
2. Sort each site into a page type: roundup ("best X tools", "X alternatives"), article, community thread, video, review site or reference page.
3. Open each cited page and record your status: absent, mentioned without a link, or linked. A mention without a link is usually the cheapest fix; an absence on a much-cited roundup is usually the most valuable.
4. Rank the gaps by how often each engine cites the page and how much that engine matters to you.

Expect the mix to differ by engine. In our scans of the questions Cituna tracks about AI visibility software, the source types looked like this.

The counts leave out the vendors Cituna tracks as competitors and the engines' own pages (methodology). One category is not every category, so treat this as a picture of what an audit can reveal, not a forecast for yours.

How do you check what engines say about you?

1. Ask each engine direct questions about your company: what it does, what it costs, what it integrates with, who it suits.
2. Mark every wrong or outdated statement, and note the source the engine cited for it.
3. Fix the facts on your own pages first, with a visible last-updated date.
4. Ask the owners of third-party pages that carry the wrong facts to correct them. How to correct wrong information about your brand in AI answers covers the process.

What first-party data belongs in the audit?

• Google Search Console, Generative AI performance report: impressions of your pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date.
• Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance: citations of your pages in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, and the grounding queries behind them.
• Analytics: visits from ChatGPT, which OpenAI says carry utm_source=chatgpt.com in the referral URL.

These cover your own site only, so they complement the prompt runs rather than replace them.

How do you turn the findings into a plan?

Fix in this order: access blockers first, then wrong facts, then missing pages for your most valuable questions, then source gaps on the engines that matter most to you. Re-run the presence and source checks on a fixed schedule so you can see what changed.

Which AI visibility audit tool covers which part?

A tool earns its place in the presence and source parts, which are the ones that have to be repeated. Access and accuracy can be checked by hand once a quarter.

Cituna checks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode daily from $39 a month on its Starter plan, with Google Search Console on every plan. For each gap it finds it ranks a fix tied to the answers that produced it and writes the fix. Cituna's own guide to what an AI visibility audit checks sets out the layers it measures, and the tools table compares it with eight other trackers.

• All four parts on seven engines, re-run daily, with the fixes written: Cituna, from $39 a month.
• Access only, free: Cituna's free AI visibility checker, or Trakkr's AI Site Grader.
• A free one-day presence snapshot: Ahrefs' AI Visibility Checker, six engines with no signup.
• Presence with Microsoft Copilot at the lowest price: Otterly.AI Lite, $29, with a GEO audit.
• No budget at all: the manual steps above, for 15 to 30 questions.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best AI visibility audit tool?

For all four parts of the audit on seven engines, re-run every day, Cituna: a free crawler check for access, then daily answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode with the pages each one cited, from $39 a month (checked 29 September 2026). For a free one-day snapshot, Ahrefs' AI Visibility Checker covers six engines with no signup; for Microsoft Copilot at the lowest price, Otterly.AI's $29 Lite includes a GEO audit (checked 28 and 29 September 2026).

Can you run an AI visibility audit for free?

Yes, one part at a time. Read your robots.txt against the crawler table above or run a free crawler check, ask each engine your buyer questions in its free tier and log the answers, and open the pages it cites. Nothing is stored, so repeating it by hand each week is the cost.

How often should you re-run an AI visibility audit?

Re-run the presence and source checks on a fixed schedule, at least weekly while you are changing pages, because the same question can get a different answer from one run to the next. Access and accuracy change less often and can be checked when you change templates, prices or products.

What to do first

• Read your robots.txt against the crawler table above.
• Confirm the Search generative AI control in Search Console is set to include.
• Run your top 10 buyer questions on each engine and list every cited source.
• Open the three most-cited roundups and record whether you are on them.