I want the business to appear when customers use AI to search
An AI search visibility audit records how the business appears in major AI answers and what can be improved.
This asks four assistants the same five customer questions, writes down exactly what each one says about you, and dates it. Then it separates the causes: the assistants cannot reach your site, your facts are wrong somewhere, your pages do not answer the question, an outside source is saying something else, or nobody is measuring.
Nobody can sell you a place in an AI answer. No mention, citation, link, ranking or date is promised here, and no provider can promise one. What is real is the measurement, and what it finds.
The audit names what is worth changing and what it would take. The improvements themselves are quoted after, once you have seen the evidence, so you decide what is worth doing rather than buying a package first.
You will see this sold as AEO or GEO. AEO is answer engine optimization, being the source an assistant uses when it answers. GEO is generative engine optimization, the same idea named for systems that write an answer instead of listing links.
It is a measurement, not an optimization package. What the assistants currently say about you is recorded and dated, alongside what they are actually able to read on your site.
Nobody can promise a mention, and any service that does is guessing. What you get is evidence of where you stand and a list of what is worth changing, with the work quoted separately once you have seen it.
A dated record of what four answer systems actually said, the evidence behind every finding, and a practical order of work.
What you will not have is a promise of a mention, a citation, a link, a recommendation, traffic or a date. Google says that meeting every requirement does not mean it will crawl, index or serve a page, and that indexing and serving are not guaranteed. No other system promises more than that either.
More on how working together works.
This is your service when:
| What is happening | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| The website does not appear in ordinary Google results | SEO and local Google Search |
| An audit already named the repairs and you want them carried out | Ask about this service |
| You do not know which customer questions need which pages | Keyword research and page map |
| Your name, address, hours or services are wrong across other sites | Business listings and directories |
| The real problem is too few reviews, or what the reviews say | Google reviews |
| You want Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo or IndexNow connected | SEO implementation and website optimization |
If several of these overlap, say so. It can be quoted as one ordered project instead of making you buy several disconnected services.
There is no single place to be found. Each assistant reaches the web through a different door, and four of them are not Google.
| Assistant | Where its web answers come from |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | Google's own Search index. Google calls this grounding and says the features are rooted in core Search ranking. |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing. Microsoft: it "may fetch information from the Bing search service". |
| ChatGPT | Its own crawler, plus search providers OpenAI does not name. The privacy policy it links under those providers is Microsoft's. |
| Perplexity | Its own index, which it describes as covering "hundreds of billions of webpages". |
| Claude | Its own Claude-SearchBot. Anthropic has not published what index sits behind it. |
| Meta AI | Its own crawler, meta-webindexer. |
Ranking well on Google does not put you in ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity or Claude. Each one has to be able to reach and read the site on its own terms.
There are three kinds of AI crawler, not two, and the difference decides whether a business appears in AI answers at all.
The common mistake is a robots file that blocks the citation crawlers and leaves the training crawlers running, which is the opposite of what was intended. It takes minutes to check and it is the first thing looked at.
A robots file can say yes while the hosting, the CDN or the firewall says no. OpenAI names this directly, telling publishers to confirm the host or content delivery network allows its published searchbot IP addresses.
This is the check that turns up the most, because nobody set out to block an assistant. A security rule did it, and the site owner was never told.
There is no single AI visibility score here. Six different things are recorded separately, because they are not interchangeable.
A business can be named without receiving a link. A page can be cited without producing an inquiry. One favorable answer is not a market position.
Answers are recorded with the wording, the system, the date and the conditions used, because a run on another day can return something different. Nothing here treats a single answer as permanent.
Only three of these publish guidance for site owners at all, and they do not agree on what matters.
Four systems are tested. Everything stated below about how each one works is the platform's own published documentation, and every link goes to that documentation. Where a platform publishes nothing on a point, nothing is claimed on it.
Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, that existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile, and that you do not need to create machine readable files, AI text files, markup or special schema.org structured data for these features. Google also says a page needs to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to be eligible as a supporting link, and that indexing and serving are not guaranteed even when everything is correct.
Search Console has a generative AI performance report. Google says it includes impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the data can be grouped by page, country, device and date. Where the property has data, that baseline is recorded and dated. Impressions are not converted into a promised position. Google's documentation for that report.
Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report in public preview. Microsoft says it shows total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries and page level citation activity across Microsoft Copilot, AI generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Microsoft also says those counts do not indicate ranking, authority or the role of any page within an individual answer, and that page level citation activity reflects how often pages are cited rather than page importance, ranking or placement. Microsoft's announcement of the report.
OpenAI documents separate crawlers and says what each one is for. OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features. GPTBot is used to crawl content that may be used in training generative AI foundation models. ChatGPT-User covers user initiated actions and OAI-AdsBot covers ad validation. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. OpenAI's crawler documentation.
Those are separate decisions, and the audit reports them separately. The training decision is yours, and no part of this recommends permitting training in order to gain visibility. Nothing in that documentation offers a business a mention or a citation.
A limited prompt test is a repeatable sample, not a complete report of everything every user sees.
Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity, and says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. It documents Perplexity-User as supporting user actions, and says that fetcher generally ignores robots rules because a person asked the question. Perplexity's crawler documentation. The audit records whether each is permitted. Nothing in that documentation promises inclusion or a citation.
An llms.txt file is a plain list of your important pages, written for machines, placed at the root of the site. It was proposed in September 2024 so that an assistant reading a site gets a clean summary instead of pages full of navigation.
Absence from five questions is not proof that a business is invisible everywhere. It is evidence about five recorded questions on a recorded date.
Google's structured data guidelines say markup is a true representation of the page and that content readers cannot see is not marked up. No markup is added here to describe something the page does not say.
Google says to write non-commodity content that readers find helpful and reliable, and says creating large numbers of pages to manipulate AI responses violates its scaled content abuse spam policy. Google's guidance on that. No page count is produced here to game an answer.
Fake reviews, purchased mentions, disguised community promotion and fabricated authority are excluded. They are not offered at any price.
Everything below is delivered for one business, one website, one language and one market.
The audit identifies the problem and names the next work. Repairs are not part of it. You get a separate written quote based on the approved priorities, the access that exists and the limits of the website and the outside platforms.
There is no universal AI repair. A blocked crawler, a missing service page, a false directory record and a lack of independent authority are four different jobs at four different prices.
Completing those changes makes information clearer and technically available. It does not make an answer engine use it.
The builder, the hosting, the security layer and who owns the accounts decide whether the robots file, headers, canonicals, sitemaps, templates, navigation, structured data, redirects, server responses, firewall rules, server logs or measurement can be reached at all. Some builders expose those in settings. Some need a higher plan, direct code access, a hosting administrator or the original developer. A public website can be audited without editing access. The platform and the permissions are confirmed before implementation is priced.
| Indexing, canonicals, sitemaps, redirects and internal links | Website SEO Audit |
| Deciding which customer question needs which page | Keyword research and page map |
| Writing or substantially rewriting the pages themselves | Copywriting |
| Correcting names, services, locations and hours across other sites | Business listings and directories |
| Building a compliant review system and replying to feedback | Google reviews |
| Connecting Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and IndexNow | SEO implementation and website optimization |
| Analytics, conversion measurement and ongoing dashboards | Tracking and reports |
| Templates, JavaScript, hosting or code the builder does not expose | Web design |
A link to another service explains the boundary. It does not make that work part of this audit. Hacked content, impersonation, defamation, trademark and regulated claim problems go to a security, legal or reputation specialist, not to me.
Those limits are the reason the audit exists in this shape. Establish the evidence, correct what you control, document what sits outside it, and measure later movement against the same agreed baseline.
Split in two on purpose. The first list is all I need to price this and tell you whether you even want it. The second only matters once you have said yes.
That is the form below. A few minutes, and it saves a call.
The public audit still runs when an account does not exist. First-party platform and referral findings cannot be confirmed without the matching data, and the report says so where that happens. No password is sent by email or text. You stay the owner of every account.
The report is normally delivered within ten business days after payment and after the required information, decisions and access have arrived. Your proposal carries the actual window.
If information or access arrives late, the delivery date moves and the work may return to the next available opening.
That window is a delivery date for the report. It is not a date for visibility in any answer system, and no such date is offered.
The audit is paid in full before it is scheduled. Once the work has been scheduled and started, the payment is not refunded, and what has been completed is yours either way.
A one-time audit answers what is happening now and what is most likely worth fixing. A second run answers a narrower question: did the recorded signals change.
Monitoring measures movement. It does not claim that any particular change caused it. New questions, new systems, content production and implementation stay separate work, quoted separately. Monitoring is not part of the audit price.
The report, the exported records and your recommendations are yours. Third party platforms and licensed data stay subject to their own terms.
Completion means the evidence was recorded and the report delivered. It does not mean an answer engine changed, and it does not mean repairs were included.
Any factual error in the report is corrected without charge when you report it within 14 days of delivery.
New questions, new systems, new test dates, new competitors or a business change after testing has begun are additional scope and may need a new quote.
If required access, information or approval does not arrive, the project can be closed with the completed work documented. Previously completed work will not be repeated. Reopening or extending the audit may need a new quote.
Once the audit has been scheduled and started, the payment is not refunded. You get the work completed to that point.
The changes can be quoted after you have seen the findings. The audit deliberately does not include them, so the diagnosis is not written by the person hoping to sell the repair. Some of the work is website changes, some is listings or reviews, and some belongs to another service. You get told which is which, and a separate quote for the parts you want done.
It overlaps. Crawling, indexing, readable content and credible sources matter to both, and Google says existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile for its AI features. This adds the parts SEO does not cover: testing answer systems directly, recording citations and factual descriptions, and reading the first-party AI reports where they exist. Most honest AI visibility work starts with good SEO rather than replacing it.
OpenAI controls its systems, and nothing in its documentation offers a business a mention or a citation. What can be done is verify the access settings OpenAI publishes, record what appeared for the agreed questions, and improve the sources you control.
The audit, the evidence, the report and any separately approved implementation work are what is guaranteed. Whether a platform crawls, indexes, cites, links to, recommends or keeps mentioning the business is outside anyone's control.
Not for Google. Google says you do not need machine readable files, AI text files, markup or special schema.org structured data to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. OpenAI and Perplexity publish crawler controls, and those are access settings. None of it is sold as a shortcut.
OpenAI documents GPTBot as crawling content that may be used in training foundation models, and OAI-SearchBot as surfacing websites in ChatGPT's search features. They are separate decisions and the audit reports them separately. The training decision stays yours.
It proves what appeared under those recorded conditions on that date. A useful baseline needs agreed repeated questions, the first-party reports where they exist, and a later comparison against the same records.
Yes. An answer can lean on older pages or on outside sources you do not control. The audit finds the conflicting sources it can and names who owns each one. Removal from a third party site is not promised.
Because every answer is recorded with its wording, system, date and conditions, and that record is the evidence. Five questions across four systems is twenty records that can be repeated later and compared. More questions, more systems or more markets are quoted as additional scope.
The public audit still runs. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools can be connected as separately quoted work, and until they carry data, the report says which findings could not be confirmed instead of filling the gap with an assumption.
Yes. Every recommendation names the owner, the dependency and the effort, so your staff or another qualified provider can work from it.
Yes, by video. This audit needs nobody in the room. In person covers Palm Beach County, Broward County and the Treasure Coast.
You get the findings first, then a separate quote for the work you want carried out.
Tell me the result you want and where I can see the business now. I use that information to identify the most useful service or package and decide whether I can quote it in writing. If one missing detail changes the work or price, I will ask for that detail or suggest a short call.
Derek PackerI will review what you sent and reply within two business days.
You will receive a copy of your inquiry. Look for an email from Derek Packer with the subject Inquiry Received — Here’s Your Copy. If it is not in your inbox, check spam, promotions or other folders. Still missing? Email [email protected].