AI Visibility Audit: Does AI Recommend You or a Competitor?

01

What Does the AI Visibility Audit Check?

The AI Visibility Audit checks two things: what AI answer engines say when your buyers ask for a business like yours, and whether those engines can read your website in the first place.

• The answers. 15 buyer questions × 3 engines = 45 checks. For each one we record whether your business is absent, named, cited as a source, or recommended as the pick, and which businesses the engine names instead.
• The access. Whether your robots.txt, your firewall or CDN settings, or a JavaScript-heavy site is quietly keeping AI crawlers out. If the bots cannot read your pages, no amount of content work will get you cited.

The three engines are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews / AI Mode, and Perplexity. We test the same three in every audit so your score can be compared month to month.

02

Who Is the AI Visibility Audit For?

The AI Visibility Audit is for businesses whose buyers research before they call: the kind of buyer who asks ChatGPT "who's the best commercial cleaning company in Dallas?" or asks Google whether a company is legit before picking up the phone.

It fits well if:

• You sell a considered service: legal, healthcare, home services, B2B, SaaS, real estate or professional services. (See the industries we work in.)
• You rank reasonably well on Google but have no idea what AI tools say about you.
• A competitor keeps coming up in conversations as "the one ChatGPT recommended."
• You want a baseline number before you spend anything on AI search work.
• You can act on the findings, either with your own team or with ours on a monthly retainer.

It is not a fit if you want an instant automated score. Software tools do that, and they work by sampling. This audit is slower, hand-run and specific to your buyers.

03

What Do You Get in the AI Visibility Audit?

The CFS Marketing AI Visibility Audit delivers a written report and a walkthrough call. The report contains:

1. Your query set. 15 questions built from how your buyers phrase them: 10 "money" questions (the ones asked right before someone hires or buys) and 5 brand questions (your name, your reviews, whether your brand is legit, you vs. your main competitor, and a category question). You approve the list before we run anything.
2. Your AI Visibility Score out of 100, and its band (Invisible, Present, Contender or Dominant).
3. A money score and a brand score, reported separately. The split tells you whether the problem is your content or how much the engines trust your name. Those need different fixes.
4. A per-engine read. How ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity each treat you, because they rarely agree.
5. The "who owns the answer" table. The businesses and websites the engines name and cite instead of you. This is your real competitor set in AI search, and it is often not the competitors you expected: a directory, a "best of" list or a Reddit thread can own answers your main rival doesn't.
6. The full scoring grid. All 45 checks, each with its score, the source the engine cited, and a short note.
7. An AI crawler access check. robots.txt, Cloudflare and firewall settings, and JavaScript rendering, with a pass or fail and the exact fix for anything blocked.
8. Your top 3 fixes, ranked by how fast they should move your score.
9. Optional: the Search Console check. If you give us read-only Google Search Console access, we add a 16-month comparison of impressions against clicks. Impressions rising while clicks stay flat is a sign Google is answering with your content and keeping the visit.

04

How Does the AI Visibility Audit Work?

The AI Visibility Audit runs in five steps, and you are involved in two of them: the intake call and approving your questions.

1. Intake call (30 minutes)

We learn what you sell, who buys it, which three to five pages make you money, and which competitor you lose deals to.

2. Build and approve the query set

We draft your 15 questions, ranked by likely revenue impact, and map each money question to the page on your site that should answer it. You approve the list. A question with no page to answer it gets flagged, because that is a page you need.

3. The hand-run sweep

We run all 45 checks by hand, spread over two days, because AI answers shift with time of day and from one run to the next. Every check runs under clean conditions, so we see the answer a stranger gets, not one tailored to us:

• ChatGPT: a fresh chat for every question, with search on, asked plainly. We never lead it toward your name.
• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: an incognito window, set to your market.
• Perplexity: logged out, with the sources row recorded as closely as the answer.

If an answer changes between two runs, we score the worse one, so any error in your score runs against us, not in our favor.

4. The access check

We test whether AI crawlers can reach and read your money pages: robots.txt rules for the AI crawlers (OpenAI's, Perplexity's, Anthropic's, Google's and Bing's), Cloudflare and firewall bot settings, and whether your page copy is in the HTML or only appears after JavaScript runs. We fetch the pages the way each crawler would and record a pass or fail. Crawlers that power AI search answers are checked separately from crawlers that collect AI training data. If you block AI training on purpose, we note it and leave that decision with you.

5. Report and walkthrough call

Cesar walks you through the score, the competitor table and the top 3 fixes, and answers questions.

Timeline: your report arrives within 2 to 3 business days of approving your questions, after Cesar has reviewed every answer by hand. The walkthrough call is set once the report is ready.

05

How Is Each AI Answer Scored?

In the CFS Marketing AI Visibility Audit, each of the 45 answers is scored from 0 to 3, depending on how strongly the engine backs your business.

A citation beats a mention because a link is the engine vouching for you. A recommendation beats both, because that is the engine handing you the buyer.

The maths, shown openly. 15 questions × 3 engines × 3 points = 135 possible points. The money questions are worth up to 90 and the brand questions up to 45. Your AI Visibility Score is your total divided by 135, times 100.

Illustrative example (not a client): a business scores 22 of 90 on money questions (24%) and 16 of 45 on brand questions (36%). That is 38 of 135, a score of 28, in the Present band. The brand is trusted more than the content, so the first fixes go to the money pages, not to brand building.

Scores are never estimated or invented. Every score is dated and tied to the exact questions and engines it came from. If a check could not be run, its cell stays empty, the report is marked partial, and the maximum is adjusted and shown. A single run also proves presence, not stability, which is why we recommend re-running the same 15 questions every month.

06

Why Does AI Visibility Matter if You Already Rank on Google?

AI visibility matters because an AI answer recommends a few specific businesses by name, and ranking on Google does not guarantee you are one of them. A buyer who asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best provider for their situation gets a short answer with a few names, not ten blue links. If your name is not in that answer, that buyer may never look at you.

Ranking and being cited are related but not the same:

• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on pages that are indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. Google says there are no additional technical requirements to appear in them, and also that meeting them does not guarantee a page will be shown. Being indexed makes you eligible. It does not make you the source the answer uses.
• ChatGPT and Perplexity run their own searches and choose their own sources. Those sources can include directories, "best of" lists, review sites and forum threads, so the businesses those pages name start with an advantage.
• Access can be lost without anyone noticing. On July 1, 2025, Cloudflare announced it was changing its default to block AI crawlers. One CDN setting can block AI crawlers from a site that ranks well on Google.

The audit shows you where you stand on each of those, measured on your own buyers' questions.

07

What Happens After the AI Visibility Audit?

After the AI Visibility Audit, the report is yours to keep and act on however you choose. There is no obligation to hire us.

Most businesses take one of three paths:

1. Fix it in-house. The top 3 fixes are written so your team or developer can act on them. Some access fixes are settings changes (robots.txt, Cloudflare); JavaScript rendering problems usually need your developer.
2. Hire CFS Marketing on a monthly retainer. Our answer engine optimization work picks up where the audit stops: answer-first rewrites of your money pages, schema markup, building trust in your business name across the sites the engines cite, and closing the gaps in your competitor table. It often runs alongside SEO, and for businesses already buying traffic, our Google Ads work.
3. Re-run it monthly. The same 15 questions, the same clean method and the same scoring standard each month, so the trend line is real. A baseline that never gets re-run is a snapshot, not a measurement.

We do not promise that any AI engine will recommend you. The engines pick their own sources, and their answers change. What we commit to is an honest score, a clear list of what is in your way, and work aimed at the fixes the audit found.

08

Who Runs the AI Visibility Audit?

Cesar Soto, founder and lead strategist of CFS Marketing, runs every AI Visibility Audit himself.

• Independent client work since 2013; founded CFS Marketing in 2022.
• Certified in Google Ads Search and Google Analytics 4.
• As in-house Director of Marketing at a B2B facility services company, he moved the company's average position in AI answers from 4.3 to 1.3 within three weeks, tracked in Profound. One company's result; AI answers vary from run to run.
• Based at our Irving, Texas office; runs audits for businesses across the US.

More on Cesar's background is on the About page.