How to Do an AI Search Optimisation Audit Step-by-Step

Have you asked ChatGPT a question about businesses in your industry and noticed your brand wasn’t mentioned? Or searched for topics your blog covers in Perplexity, only to find your competitors being cited as the go-to sources?

If so, they’re likely investing in AI Search Optimisation, which is how you ensure platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews, and AI Mode directly mention your brand, recommend your products or services, and cite your content as a trusted source.

Getting there takes a dedicated AI Search Optimisation strategy, and the first step in this strategy is an AI audit.

We worked with Exposure Ninja’s Head of SEO, Andrew Tuxford, and SEO Strategy Manager, Nicola Tuxford, to create a simple, effective 6-step AI audit that helps you understand where you stand and what to do next to boost your AI visibility.

Here’s how it breaks down:

• Steps 1–3: Reveal how your brand is currently seen and spoken about.
• Steps 4–5: Uncover why you’re being positioned that way.
• Step 6: Build a focused, prioritised action plan to fix it.

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What is an AI Search Optimisation Audit?

An AI Search Optimisation audit analyses how your brand appears across AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini, and Bing Copilot.

Unlike traditional search engines, these tools don’t display a list of ten blue links. Instead, they generate personalised, conversational answers, pulling from various sources like your website, customer reviews, media mentions, forums, and other third-party content. The audit helps you understand how well these tools recognise, describe, and recommend your business in response to relevant prompts.

“When you start AI Search Optimisation, you need to first understand how AI platforms see your brand,” says Nicola Tuxford. “You need to ‘interview’ them by asking clear, objective questions about your business and assess the accuracy of their answers. What’s right? What’s wrong? What’s missing?”

As AI changes how people discover, research, and choose businesses, it’s no longer enough to optimise for rankings alone. You need to ensure your brand is clearly and accurately positioned in the answers these tools generate. That starts with understanding how you’re currently being represented so you can close the gap between how you see your brand and how AI presents it to your audience.

Many businesses skip this step, and it shows. “We often see AI tools giving vague or incorrect descriptions of a brand, or missing key selling points altogether,” Nicola Tuxford explains. “That’s an issue. If AI platforms can’t understand or confidently represent your brand, they won’t surface you in relevant answers, which means missed opportunities.”

An AI Search Optimisation Audit starts with understanding what makes your brand unique and then testing how well AI platforms understand it. Ask them the questions you want to be found for and see where the gaps are.

Nicola Tuxford
SEO Strategy Manager

How Does an AI Search Optimisation Audit Differ from an SEO Audit?

An AI audit might sound like a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) audit, but each targets a different type of visibility across distinct digital platforms.

An SEO audit analyses your website’s performance in traditional search engines like Google. It looks at technical performance, content structure, keyword rankings, backlinks, and other factors that influence visibility in search results.

AI audits are about reputation, relevance, and visibility in AI-generated responses.

Here’s how they compare:

Both of these audits matter because AI Search Optimisation and SEO work together to shape your digital visibility. Traditional SEO ensures you’re discoverable in search engines. AI optimisation ensures you’re chosen when users ask smart tools for help.

Step 1: Audit AI’s Understanding of Your Brand

The first step in your AI audit is to assess brand awareness and brand accuracy across AI platforms. This means checking whether the platforms recognise your business and how well they describe who you are, what you do, and where and who you serve.

Prompt each AI platform with factual, brand-specific queries such as:

• “Have you heard of [your brand]?”
• “What are [your brand]’s values?”
• “Where does [your brand] operate?”
• “What services or products does [your brand] offer?”
• “Who is the ideal customer for [your brand]?”

Then assess the responses:

• Is your brand recognised at all?
• Are the answers accurate and complete?
• Is anything important missing or incorrect?
• Do the descriptions reflect how you position your business?

You might assume these tools already know who you are, but many businesses are surprised to find that some platforms don’t recognise them at all. “We had a client that hadn’t been recognised by several AI platforms,” says Nicola Tuxford. “We recommended a focused brand-building push, including improving their social presence, increasing media coverage, and ensuring their brand identity was consistent and active across channels. Just by asking the right questions, we uncovered blind spots the client didn’t know existed.”

In some cases, the issue isn’t invisibility, but damaging inaccuracies. “In one audit for a financial services client, we found that AI platforms were incorrectly suggesting the business only served a limited customer group,” says Nicola Tuxford. “The misunderstanding came from a few old Trustpilot reviews that hadn’t been addressed. Once we identified the issue, we recommended that the client respond to those reviews and clarify their offering.”

By checking for factual accuracy and brand clarity early, you can spot misalignments before they impact how potential customers see you.

Step 2: Check Your Brand Visibility in AI Tools

The next step is to track your brand visibility in AI responses. AI brand visibility typically falls into three key formats:

• Direct Mentions: Your brand name is clearly included in the AI’s answer.
• Citations or Sources: Your website or content is linked or referenced in the source list.
• Recommendation Lists: Your brand is featured in round-ups of top tools, providers, or services.

Together, these signals make up your AI Share of Voice, a measure of how often and how prominently your brand appears in AI-generated answers compared to your competitors. The higher your share, the more influence you have in AI-powered discovery. If your brand rarely shows up (or not at all), it’s a sign that AI platforms don’t yet view you as a trusted source.

To check this, open AI tools and enter queries that reflect what potential customers might ask, such as:

• “What are the best [industry] providers in [location]?”
• “Which companies offer [solution] for small businesses?”
• “What alternatives are there to [Your Brand]?”

Then, review each result:

• Is your brand mentioned directly in the answer?
• Is your website linked or cited in the sources?
• Are you included in any top-provider or best-of lists?
• If not, which competitors are showing up and how are they described?

We recommend logging your findings in our AI Visibility Tracker. For each platform and prompt, record whether your brand appeared, in what format, and where in the response it was positioned. This gives you a clear, data-backed view of your current AI presence.

Step 3: Analyse How AI Tools Speak About You

Once you’ve confirmed that AI platforms can identify your brand and that you’re appearing in relevant responses, the next step is to analyse how they speak about you.

This is where you shift from brand visibility to brand sentiment, not just whether you’re mentioned, but also what’s being said and how it’s being framed.

AI-generated answers reflect the tone, language, and sentiment of the sources they draw from. That includes your website, online reviews, media coverage, forums, and third-party content. If those sources contain outdated messaging, inaccurate claims, or even a few poorly written reviews, the AI may describe your brand in ways that don’t align with how you want to be seen.

Use prompts like:

• “What are the pros and cons of using [Your Brand]?”
• “Why do people choose [Your Brand] over others?”
• “How does [Your Brand] compare to [Competitor]?”
• “Is [Your Brand] trustworthy?”
• “What’s the reputation of [Your Brand]?”

To assess sentiment, pay close attention to:

• Tone: Is the description of your brand positive, neutral, or slightly negative?
• Language: Are the words used to describe your products or services compelling, vague, or overly cautious?
• Framing: Does the AI emphasise your strengths or highlight concerns or limitations?
• Competitor Comparison: Are your competitors described more confidently or favourably than your brand? Are they positioned as stronger, more trusted, or more widely recommended?

“We recently ran an AI audit for a client with strong visibility across several platforms,” says Andrew Tuxford. “But we noticed a recurring issue: ChatGPT and other tools consistently described the brand as ‘expensive’. After a strategic pricing repositioning and messaging update, we re-tested the same prompts six weeks later, and the negative sentiment was gone.”

By actively monitoring how AI tools speak about your brand, you stay in control of your narrative and ensure that what’s being said is exactly what you want your future customers to hear.

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Step 4: Identify Content and Authority Gaps on Your Website

Now it’s time to evaluate how well your content supports your brand’s AI visibility.

AI tools are frequently used for informational, top-of-funnel queries. These are early-stage, non-branded queries where users simply look for guidance, not yet comparing providers. It’s also where awareness and trust begin to build. If your content is being referenced by AI at this stage, your brand becomes part of the conversation before users start narrowing their options.

To find out how you’re performing, start with a content audit:

1. Review your existing blogs, especially your most visited or strategically important articles.
2. For each topic you’ve written on, ask AI tools relevant questions that your content answers.
3. Check whether your content is being cited or linked as a source.

If your content isn’t being referenced, it likely means you haven’t structured your content for AI or included the trust signals that AI tools rely on.

Or, the topic coverage isn’t comprehensive enough. AI tools use a technique called query fan-out, where they anticipate and respond to related follow-up questions. You may have answered the core question, but if you’ve missed surrounding queries, your content won’t appear comprehensive enough to be referenced.

Strong AI visibility depends on a content strategy that goes beyond surface-level answers. Use your audit findings to update thin content, expand into related topics, and build depth around key themes. This strengthens your topical authority and ensures your content is trusted, cited, and surfaced by AI tools when your audience is looking for answers.

Step 5: Check Your Visibility on Third-Party Sites

AI platforms don’t just rely on your website to understand and represent your brand; they pull data from various third-party sources to shape their answers. These external signals shape how trustworthy and visible your business appears in AI-generated responses.

To evaluate your off-site visibility, look at how your brand is mentioned across third-party channels like:

• Review platforms like Trustpilot, Google Reviews, and industry-specific aggregators.
• Business directories such as Clutch, Yelp, or local listings.
• Media coverage and press mentions.
• Podcasts, guest features, and interviews.
• Forums, Reddit, Quora, and community discussions.
• Social platforms including LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

If your brand has strong, positive visibility across trusted sites, it reinforces your reliability as a recommended provider. But if you’re barely mentioned or only associated with outdated or negative content, AI tools are less likely to reference or recommend your brand.

Step 6: Prioritise Your Opportunities

After auditing how AI platforms understand, reference, and represent your brand, you’ll likely be sitting on a long list of insights, gaps, and next steps. The final and most important part of the audit is turning those findings into a focused, actionable plan.

“When interviewing the AI platforms, you want to spend a decent amount of time on it,” says Andrew Tuxford. “This isn’t going to be complete within half an hour. Spend a full day, even two. The more time you invest, the more insight you’ll uncover. But once you have the data, it’s crucial to prioritise, otherwise you’ll spread yourself too thin.”

With AI search, not every issue you find will carry the same weight. Some inaccuracies might be minor or irrelevant to your customers, while others could directly impact how you’re discovered, trusted, and chosen. The key is to align your action plan with your business priorities and niche-specific needs.

Start by categorising your audit findings and scoring them based on two factors:

1. Impact: How much could this issue affect your visibility, brand perception, or conversions?
2. Effort: How much time and resources are needed to fix or improve it?

If we had to prioritise common AI visibility issues, here’s how we’d typically rank them:

• Brand, Product, or Service Inaccuracies: If AI platforms are misrepresenting what you do, who you serve, or what you offer, this needs immediate attention. These inaccuracies can actively deter potential customers.
• Negative or Neutral Brand Sentiment: If the tone used by AI tools is flat, overly cautious, or negative, it could influence trust and perception before customers reach your site.
• Missing Mentions or Citations: If your brand isn’t appearing in relevant prompts, you must improve your on-site and off-site authority signals.
• Content Gaps and Weak Topical Authority: If your blog or knowledge hub isn’t being picked up by AI tools, focus on filling those gaps to improve how frequently and confidently AI platforms reference your brand.
• Low Visibility on Third-Party Platforms: If you’re not mentioned on directories, review sites, or media platforms, your authority will be weakened in the eyes of AI. Digital PR and reputation management can help here.

“What you don’t want to do,” Andrew adds, “is try to fix everything at once. Unless you’ve got a huge team and unlimited resources, you’ll end up doing a little bit of everything and solving nothing. Focus on the areas that matter most, then move to the next.”

Lead With an Expert AI Search Strategy

You now have the blueprint to run your own AI Search Optimisation audit. But if you want expert support to scale it, uncover deeper insights, and turn findings into measurable results, that’s exactly what our AI Search Strategy is built for.

We’ll handle the entire audit process for you, including:

• Conduct in-depth interviews across major AI platforms.
• Analyse how your brand is positioned, referenced, and perceived.
• Identify the gaps, opportunities, and priorities.
• Build a tailored, step-by-step plan to improve your AI visibility.
• Integrate this seamlessly into your wider marketing strategy.

If you’re ready to lead in AI Search, request a callback to partner with leading experts already driving AI visibility for ambitious brands.

Not sure if an AI audit is worth the time? Watch:

FAQs

How often should you run an AI Search Optimisation audit?

You should perform a full AI audit at least quarterly. But if you’re publishing a lot of content or in a fast-moving industry, aim for monthly brand visibility checks.

What’s the difference between an SEO audit and an AI Search audit?

An SEO audit checks how well your site ranks in Google based on traditional signals like site speed, backlinks, and keyword rankings. An AI Search audit checks how AI tools describe, recommend, and reference your brand in conversational responses. They serve different goals but work best together.

What tools can I use to speed up the AI Search Optimisation audit?

Use tools like Semrush’s AI Toolkit* to track prompt coverage and mentions. Profound offers generative AI monitoring. Combine these tools with manual testing to get complete insights.

*Some links in this article are affiliate links that Exposure Ninja receives a fee for promoting (these links are not sponsored). Exposure Ninja only promotes services we already use within our marketing stack.