Find where AI search misses your brand

The instinct is to treat AI visibility as SEO with a new label. It behaves differently in three ways that matter for how you audit it.

There is no position to track. An answer engine returns one synthesized response with a handful of citations. You are either cited or you are not. A page that ranks respectably on page one of classic search can be entirely absent from the answer covering the same question.

The prompt is the keyword, and it is messier. People write answer engines full sentences with context attached, closer to "what's the best A/B testing tool for a small marketing team without developers" than to a three-word query. The phrasing varies, and so do the answers.

Results are not stable. Ask the same question twice and the cited sources can differ. This is why a single spot check tells you very little and why the audit below is built around a fixed prompt set you re-run, rather than a one-time snapshot.

The practical consequence: you are auditing whether your pages are easy to find, easy to extract from, and clearly attributable to you, not whether they rank.

Step 1. Build a prompt set that mirrors how buyers actually ask. Write 20 to 40 questions a real prospect would type, in full sentences, and group them into four buckets: category questions ("what tools do X"), comparison questions ("X vs Y"), problem questions ("how do I fix X"), and brand questions ("is X any good"). Pull the wording from your own search console queries, sales call notes, and support tickets rather than inventing it. Fix this list and reuse it every round, because the value of the audit comes from comparing the same prompts over time.

Step 2. Run the prompts and record who gets cited. Take the set through the engines your buyers use, logging for each prompt: whether you were mentioned, whether you were cited with a link, which page was cited, and which competitors appeared. Run each prompt at least twice, on separate days, so you can tell a stable absence from a coin flip. Use a clean session or a logged-out window so your own history does not shape the answer. The output is one row per prompt per engine in a spreadsheet, nothing more elaborate.

Step 3. Sort the gaps and prioritize the pages that can close them. Most gaps fall into three types, and they need different fixes. *No page exists* on the topic, so a competitor owns the answer by default; that is a content brief. *A page exists but is never cited*, usually because the answer is buried in a video, a PDF, a gated asset, or 900 words of preamble; that is a rewrite. *You are cited but described wrongly*, which means the page is ambiguous about what the product is and who it is for. Rank the resulting work by commercial value of the prompt, how often the gap appeared, and how cheap the fix is. Start where an existing page needs a rewrite, since that is the shortest path from work to result.

Step 4. Fix, then re-run the same prompts on a cadence. Answer engines re-crawl and re-index on their own schedule, so treat this as a slow loop: publish the changes, then re-run the identical prompt set 30 to 60 days later and compare. Track two numbers across rounds, the share of prompts where you were cited and the share where you appeared at all. Movement on a fixed prompt set is real evidence. A single impressive answer you screenshotted is not.

When you get to the rewrite work in step 3, the changes that help are mostly unglamorous. A model has to be able to lift a self-contained, attributable answer off your page.

Answer the question in the first paragraph. Put the direct answer at the top and the persuasion underneath. A page that opens with brand atmosphere and reaches the substance in the sixth paragraph gives an engine nothing clean to quote.

Write claims that stand on their own. "Tailor runs A/B tests on existing pages without developer work" survives being pulled out of context. "It just works" does not. Name the product, the audience, and the outcome in the same sentence.

Use headings that read as questions. Section headings matching the shape of a real prompt make the relevant passage easy to locate.

Get the substance out of assets an engine cannot read. Answers trapped in images, videos, slide decks, or gated PDFs are invisible. If a claim matters, it needs to exist as text on the page.

Keep your own facts current and consistent. Pricing, positioning, and integration lists that contradict each other across pages produce exactly the vague or wrong descriptions you found in step 2.

One caution worth stating plainly: nobody controls what an answer engine cites, and anyone selling you guaranteed placement is selling something else. The work you control is making the right pages exist, load, and say the right thing clearly.