Contributors:
Amol Ghemud Published: February 16, 2026
Summary
AI Visibility Audits help brands understand whether they appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude for buyer-intent searches. The audit checks your AI citation presence, entity profile strength, structured data quality, content readiness, and technical infrastructure, then assigns an overall AI Visibility Score out of 100.
You also receive a detailed report with a citation gap map, structured data validation findings, content improvement recommendations, and a prioritized action plan so you know exactly what to fix first to improve your visibility across AI platforms.
In This Article
Share On:
An AI Visibility Audit checks whether your brand appears in responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude when buyers ask about your product category. It identifies gaps in your entity profile, structured data, content quality, and technical infrastructure, then gives you a prioritized action plan to fix them.
Most brands don’t know they’re invisible to AI engines until they check. And by then, their competitors have already been building AI visibility for months.
This page explains exactly what we check, why each element matters, what you get in the audit report, and how to book yours. No charge. No commitment. Just a clear picture of where you are and what it takes to get where you need to be.
What Do We Check in an AI Visibility Audit?
We evaluate your brand across five critical dimensions that determine whether AI engines cite you, ignore you, or cite your competitors instead. Each dimension gets a score, and the combined result gives you an overall AI Visibility Score out of 100.
Dimension 1: AI Citation Presence
We ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude the questions your buyers actually ask. “Best [your category] in India.” “Which [your product] should a [your target customer] use?” “Compare [you] vs [competitor].” We run 15-20 variations of your core queries across all four platforms.
For each query, we document: does your brand appear? In what context? What does the AI say about you? Which competitors show up instead? This map becomes your citation gap analysis.
Dimension 2: Entity Profile Strength
We evaluate your brand’s entity presence across the platforms AI engines use for verification. LinkedIn company page completeness. Google Business Profile accuracy. Crunchbase profile status. Industry directory listings. Website Organization schema. SameAs linking between profiles.
AI engines cross-reference multiple sources to verify brands. The more consistent and complete your entity profile, the more confident they are in recommending you.
Dimension 3: Structured Data Quality
We crawl your website and evaluate all schema markup implementations. Organization schema, Article schema, FAQ schema, Product/Service schema, HowTo schema, and Review schema. We check for completeness, accuracy, and proper JSON-LD formatting.
We also test with Google’s Rich Results Test to identify broken or malformed markup. Poorly implemented schema is worse than no schema because it signals technical sloppiness to AI crawlers.
Dimension 4: Content Readiness
We evaluate your top 20 content pages against GEO standards. Does each section start with a canonical answer? Are headings in question format? Is the content informational or promotional? Are there specific data points and named frameworks? Do you have content clusters with internal linking?
This dimension has the highest impact on AI citation rates. Content quality determines whether AI engines trust you enough to cite.
Dimension 5: Technical Infrastructure
We check your robots.txt for AI crawler access (OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot). We verify UTM tracking for AI referral traffic. We assess page speed and mobile responsiveness (AI engines consider user experience). And we check whether your product feeds are current if applicable.
Why Does an AI Visibility Audit Matter Now?
The timing matters because ChatGPT Ads launched in the US on February 9, 2026, and India is expected to follow. Brands that understand their current AI visibility position can build strategically. Brands that don’t are flying blind.
Here’s the reality. Every month you wait is a month of compounding visibility you lose. AI visibility works like SEO: the early movers build authority that later entrants can’t quickly replicate. The brands scoring well on AI visibility today will have a structural advantage when ChatGPT Ads hit India.
An audit gives you the baseline. Without it, you’re guessing at what to fix, which means you’re probably fixing the wrong things. With it, you know exactly where to invest time and budget for maximum impact.
What Do You Get in the Audit Report?
The audit deliverable is a comprehensive report covering all five dimensions with specific, actionable recommendations. Here’s what’s included.
AI Visibility Score (0-100). Your overall score benchmarked against industry averages. This is the number that tells you where you stand relative to competitors.
Citation Gap Map. A query-by-query breakdown showing where your brand appears, where it doesn’t, and which competitors own the positions you need. This map directly informs your content strategy.
Entity Profile Assessment. A platform-by-platform evaluation of your entity presence with specific fixes for each gap. If your LinkedIn description doesn’t match your website, we’ll flag it. If you’re missing from Crunchbase, we’ll note it.
Structured Data Audit. A page-by-page analysis of your schema markup with validation results. We identify missing schema types, implementation errors, and opportunities to add markup that AI engines specifically look for.
Content Readiness Score. An evaluation of your top content pages against GEO standards with specific rewrite recommendations. We show you exactly which paragraphs need canonical answers, which headings should be questions, and which content is too promotional.
Technical Checklist. A pass/fail assessment of your robots.txt, AI crawler access, tracking setup, and product feed status.
Prioritized Action Plan. A sequenced list of improvements ranked by impact and effort. We tell you what to fix first, what can wait, and what the expected impact of each change is.
Who Should Get an AI Visibility Audit?
This audit is most valuable for three types of brands.
Funded startups (Seed to Series C) in competitive categories where buyers research options through AI engines. If your prospects ask ChatGPT “which [your category] should I use?”, you need to know whether you show up in the answer.
Brands already investing in SEO or content marketing that want to understand how their existing content performs in AI responses. You might be ranking well on Google but invisible to ChatGPT. Or you might have strong AI citations you didn’t know about. Either way, the audit reveals the full picture.
Companies considering ChatGPT Ads when they become available in India. The audit tells you whether your foundation is strong enough to make paid AI advertising effective, or whether you need to build the organic layer first.
What Happens After the Audit?
The audit is a diagnostic, not a sales pitch. You get the full report regardless of whether you work with us afterward.
If the audit reveals gaps you want help fixing, we offer GEO retainers that cover entity optimization, content creation, structured data implementation, and ongoing monitoring. These typically start at Rs 2-2.5 lakh per month for funded startups.
If you want to fix things in-house, the audit report gives you everything your team needs: specific issues, prioritized fixes, and measurable benchmarks to track progress.
Either way, you walk away knowing exactly where you stand and exactly what to do about it.
How upGrowth Runs AI Visibility Audits
We’ve been doing this for over 12 months, longer than most agencies have been talking about GEO. Our audit process is informed by real-world experience building AI visibility for brands like Fi.Money, Scripbox, and Lendingkart.
We run audits across all four major AI platforms because each one has different training data and citation patterns. A brand might appear in Perplexity but not ChatGPT, or vice versa. Cross-platform coverage ensures you get the complete picture.
Our team includes SEO specialists who understand technical implementation, content strategists who know how to write for AI citation, and growth marketing experts who can connect AI visibility to business outcomes. The audit reflects all three perspectives.
Book Your AI Visibility Audit
You’re one conversation away from knowing exactly where your brand stands in AI visibility, and exactly what it takes to get ahead of your competitors.
We deliver the full audit report within 5-7 business days of receiving your brand details. The analysis covers all five dimensions across all four AI platforms, so it’s thorough rather than superficial.
2. What Information Do You Need from Me?
Your brand name, website URL, primary product/service categories, target audience description, and 3-5 key competitors. That’s it. We handle the rest.
3. Do You Share My Audit Data with Anyone?
No. Your audit data is confidential and shared only with you. We don’t publish results, share them with competitors, or use them for any purpose beyond your audit.
4. What If My Score Is Low?
A low score is better than not knowing. It means you have clear, actionable items to improve. Most brands go from “not ready” to “competitive” within 3-4 months of focused effort.
For Curious Minds
The AI Visibility Score is a composite metric out of 100 that quantifies your brand's presence and authority across the primary AI engines. It synthesizes performance across five critical areas to give you a single, actionable benchmark of your AI readiness. A higher score indicates that AI platforms are more likely to trust and cite your brand when users ask questions relevant to your category, while a lower score signals significant visibility gaps that competitors may be exploiting. This score is your baseline for building a durable competitive advantage in the new era of AI-driven discovery.
The score is derived from a detailed evaluation of:
AI Citation Presence: How often you appear in responses to 15-20 core buyer queries.
Entity Profile Strength: The consistency of your brand data on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Google Business Profile.
Structured Data Quality: The accuracy and completeness of your website's schema markup.
Content Readiness: The quality and informational value of your key content assets.
Technical Infrastructure: Your site's accessibility to AI crawlers and overall user experience.
Understanding this score is the first step toward a targeted strategy. Find out what's holding your score back by exploring the full audit process.
A strong entity profile serves as the bedrock of trust for AI engines, confirming your brand's legitimacy and authority. AI models cross-reference data from multiple authoritative sources to verify who you are, what you do, and why you matter. When information on your LinkedIn company page, Crunchbase profile, and Google Business Profile is consistent and complete, it sends a powerful signal of credibility, making AI engines more confident in recommending you to users. Inconsistent or incomplete profiles create ambiguity, which causes AI to favor competitors with a clearer, more verifiable digital footprint. This verification process is not just about avoiding errors; it is about building a coherent and trustworthy narrative that an AI can easily understand and relay. The audit systematically checks for this consistency, evaluating everything from your `Organization` schema to your listings in industry directories, ensuring every touchpoint reinforces your brand's identity. See how your brand's profile stacks up by learning more about the audit's evaluation criteria.
Content readiness for AI differs significantly from traditional SEO by prioritizing informational clarity and direct answers over keyword density and backlink acquisition. While SEO content often targets search engine algorithms, AI-ready content is crafted for machine comprehension and direct citation. The audit evaluates your content on its ability to provide canonical answers, use question-formatted headings, and present objective data points rather than promotional language. The core shift is from writing for discovery to writing for direct extraction and recommendation by an AI.
To excel on platforms like Perplexity, prioritize these elements:
Start with the Answer: Each section should begin with a concise, direct answer to a likely user question.
Use Data and Frameworks: Ground your claims in specific metrics and named methodologies that AI can easily reference.
Maintain an Informational Tone: Avoid sales-oriented language that AI models are trained to disregard as biased.
Build Topic Clusters: Develop interconnected content hubs that demonstrate deep expertise on a specific subject.
This strategic approach ensures your content is not just found but is trusted enough to be used in an AI-generated response. Discover how the audit measures these qualities in your content.
The citation gap analysis is a direct competitive intelligence tool that shows you precisely where you are losing ground. For example, we might query ChatGPT with "Best accounting software for small businesses in India" and find that a competitor is recommended with a detailed feature breakdown, while your brand is not mentioned at all. The audit documents this outcome, noting the exact query, the AI's response, the competitor cited, and the specific reasons given for the recommendation. This reveals not just that a gap exists, but why it exists, pointing directly to weaknesses in your content or entity profile. You learn which specific claims, data points, or third-party verifications are convincing the AI to favor your rival. This evidence-based feedback is invaluable, as it transforms a vague problem ("we need better AI visibility") into a concrete action plan ("we must create content that details our integration capabilities, as that is why the competitor was cited"). Learn more about how these competitive insights are uncovered in the full audit report.
While the content provided does not list specific companies, the principle behind "GEO standards" (Gen-engine Optimization) is based on how Large Language Models process and synthesize information. AI engines like Claude and Gemini are designed to find and deliver the most direct, authoritative answers to user queries. Content that begins a section with a canonical answer—a clear, concise summary—is more easily parsable and fits the model's objective perfectly. For instance, a page that starts a section with "Company A's platform reduces processing time by an average of 40%..." is more citable than one that buries that data point in a long paragraph. Structuring content with question-based headings directly mirrors user queries and makes your content a perfect match for AI retrieval. This structure signals to the AI that you are explicitly addressing a user's need, increasing the probability of citation. The audit measures your top pages against these standards because they are proven to reduce the AI's cognitive load, making your information the path of least resistance. See the full methodology to understand how we score your content's structure.
After receiving your AI Visibility Audit report, a B2B tech company should focus on a pragmatic, high-impact implementation plan. The first step is to immediately address any technical roadblocks identified in the audit. This foundational work ensures that AI crawlers can access and understand your content, which is a prerequisite for any citation improvements. A clear, phased approach prevents overwhelm and builds momentum.
Here is a three-step plan:
Update Technical Permissions: The highest priority is to review and modify your `robots.txt` file. Explicitly allow crawlers like OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, and PerplexityBot to access your site. Without this, all other efforts are nullified.
Revise Top-Performing Content: Identify your top 5-10 content pages from the audit. Rework each one to include a canonical answer at the start of key sections and rephrase subheadings into direct questions that your buyers would ask.
Implement Key Schema Markups: Focus on deploying or fixing `Organization` and `Service` schema across your main site pages. This provides structured data that AI engines use for verification, directly boosting your Entity Profile Strength score.
Executing these initial steps will deliver tangible progress toward improving your AI visibility. Explore the full audit details to see how we prioritize these recommendations for you.
The launch of ChatGPT Ads in India will mark a pivotal shift from discovery via search engines to discovery via conversational AI. An AI Visibility Audit provides the foundational data for leadership to strategically pivot. It highlights that organic presence within AI responses is the new top-of-funnel, and brands that are frequently cited will have a significant competitive advantage, potentially paying less for ad placements or achieving higher conversion rates. Leadership should view investments in content readiness and structured data not as an SEO expense, but as a prerequisite for participating in the next generation of digital advertising. This means reallocating budget from traditional keyword-based campaigns toward creating high-quality, informational content and strengthening the brand's verifiable entity profile. The audit's AI Visibility Score becomes a key performance indicator for marketing, guiding long-term strategy to build authority that will pay dividends long before the ad platform even launches. Prepare for this future by understanding your current baseline today.
The audit identifies overly promotional content by analyzing the language and structure of your top 20 pages. It flags a high ratio of marketing jargon, superlatives, and sales-focused calls-to-action versus objective, data-backed information. If your content repeatedly makes claims without providing evidence, specific numbers, or named frameworks, it is flagged for low "Content Readiness." This is a critical flaw because AI engines are trained to prioritize neutral, informational sources and often dismiss content that reads like an advertisement as biased and unreliable. The solution is to shift your content strategy from selling to explaining. Rework your pages to answer customer questions directly and authoritatively. Instead of saying your product is "the best," explain *how* it solves a problem with specific data points (e.g., "reduces customer onboarding time by 30%"). By providing verifiable facts and educational insights, you transform your content from a sales pitch into a valuable resource that AI engines like Gemini and Claude are designed to trust and amplify. See how our audit can pinpoint these exact issues on your site.
Structured data is a form of code on your website that explicitly tells AI engines what your content is about, removing ambiguity. In an AI Visibility Audit, we analyze your schema markup because it is a primary source for models like Gemini to verify your brand's identity (`Organization` schema), understand your content's purpose (`Article` schema), and trust the details of your products (`Product` schema). Correct implementation is a powerful signal of technical quality because it shows you are actively helping machines understand your information. Poorly formatted or broken schema, on the other hand, is a red flag that suggests technical neglect, which can diminish an AI's trust in your entire domain. The audit uses tools like Google's Rich Results Test to crawl your site, checking for the presence, completeness, and syntactical accuracy of your JSON-LD markup. A high score in this dimension means you are providing clear, machine-readable data that boosts your credibility and increases the likelihood of being cited accurately. Learn more about the specific schema types we evaluate.
The most common and damaging technical mistake is an incorrectly configured `robots.txt` file that inadvertently blocks AI crawlers. Many websites have default settings that disallow unknown bots, and since crawlers like OAI-SearchBot (for ChatGPT) and PerplexityBot are relatively new, they are often blocked by legacy `robots.txt` rules. This single error renders all your high-quality content invisible to these platforms, resulting in an immediate and severe drop in your AI Visibility Score. This is a critical but easily fixable problem that effectively removes you from consideration before any content analysis can even occur. The solution is straightforward: an administrator must manually edit the `robots.txt` file to explicitly permit these crawlers. The audit scans your `robots.txt` file for these specific user-agent directives. The fix involves adding a "User-agent" line for each AI bot followed by an "Allow: /" directive, a change that can typically be implemented in under five minutes and instantly opens your site up to the world's leading AI engines. Find out if this simple mistake is holding your brand back.
The audit assesses your presence by simulating real-world user behavior. We develop a set of 15-20 core queries specific to your business, running each one across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude to create a comprehensive map of your current visibility. The queries are not generic; they are crafted to reflect the entire buyer journey. This multi-faceted approach ensures we capture your visibility across different stages of user intent, from broad discovery to direct brand comparisons.
The query variations typically include:
Category Leaders: "Best [your category] for [your target customer]"
Problem/Solution: "How to solve [customer pain point] using [your product type]"
Comparative Analysis: "Compare [your brand] vs [competitor A] on [feature]"
Use Case Specific: "Which [your product] is best for [specific industry need]"
For each query, we document whether you are cited, what is said about you, and which competitors appear instead. This forms the citation gap analysis, giving you a clear picture of where you need to improve. Explore the full audit to see how we customize queries for your market.
Improving your AI Visibility Score creates a sustainable advantage because, much like traditional SEO, it builds compounding authority. AI engines prioritize sources they have repeatedly found to be reliable and comprehensive. Each time your brand is successfully cited, it reinforces your credibility, making you more likely to be cited in the future. This creates a virtuous cycle where early movers build a deep well of trust that becomes a structural barrier for competitors. Latecomers cannot simply buy this authority; they must earn it over time, and they start from a significant deficit. The advantage is also multi-platform; strengthening your entity profile and content for one AI engine often improves your visibility across others, as they frequently draw from the same foundational data sources like Crunchbase and high-quality web content. By investing now, you are not just optimizing for today's algorithms but are establishing your brand as a foundational knowledge source for the AI-driven internet of tomorrow. Learn how an audit can be your first step in building this lasting advantage.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.