AI Search Visibility Audit
Last updated October 14, 2026. Written by the Third Coast AI team.
An AI search visibility audit from Third Coast AI tells you, with evidence, whether ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot name your company when a buyer asks the questions that lead to a purchase, which competitors they name instead, which pages they are citing, and which decision factors they use to pick a winner. It takes about three weeks, it runs on a prompt set we build around your buyers rather than a keyword list, and it ends in a written plan ranked by what would change the answers fastest. Price: quoted after a short scoping call.
We call it a AI visibility audit because that is what the engines do. Google has described AI Mode as issuing many sub-queries for one prompt, and our own captures show one question splitting into 10 to 20 hidden searches. If your site answers the question the buyer typed but none of the questions the engine asked behind it, you are invisible, and no amount of traditional SEO reporting will tell you that. The audit is built to tell you that.
Prompt bank
60 to 120 prompts written the way buyers ask, across four prompt types.
- Visibility
- Decision-factor mining
- Competitor
- Fact check
Retrieval-on runs
Each prompt run more than once per engine, with the engines' hidden searches and citations captured.
- ChatGPT
- AI Overviews
- AI Mode
- Gemini
- Perplexity
- Copilot
Reads against your pages
The decision factors in the engines' own words, checked page by page, and the cited pages read for shape.
- Decision factors
- Proof audit
- Citation reads
- Fact-check log
Briefs, gate, verify
Briefs modeled on the cited pages, a gate before anything publishes, and the prompt set re-run.
- Briefs
- Publish gate
- Verification
Who should run one?
The audit is for owners, CEOs and marketing directors of companies in the $5M to $100M range who already rank reasonably well in Google and have started to notice that the phone rings less for the same rankings. It is also the first step for agencies and professional-services firms that want to add AEO to what they sell, because you cannot sell a fix for a problem you have not measured.
It is not for companies with no web presence at all. The engines need something to cite, and if the site is three pages and a contact form, the audit will mostly say so. In that case we would rather point you at the GEO content program first.
Why does ranking in Google no longer settle the question?
Because the engines are not reading the same list. Ahrefs tracked the overlap between Google's top ten and the pages cited in AI Overviews and watched it fall from 76% in July 2025 to 38% in March 2026. Tom Capper at Moz measured 88% of AI Mode citations as pages that were not in the organic results for the same query at all. A page one ranking is still useful, but it has stopped being proof that the AI answer mentions you.
There is also less traffic to go around. Pew Research measured click-through at 8% on results pages with an AI summary against 15% without one in July 2025, a drop of roughly 47%, and BrightEdge's tracking now puts AI Overviews on nearly half of Google queries, and Semrush measured a 71% rise on commercial searches between November 2025 and April 2026. Your category sits somewhere on that range, and the audit tells you where.
38% is how much of Google's top ten still overlapped with AI Overview citations by March 2026, down from 76% eight months earlier (Ahrefs). Rankings and citations have become two different measurements.
Which questions does the audit put to the engines?
We build four kinds of prompts, and each one does a different job. Together they are usually 60 to 120 prompts per engagement, run on ChatGPT with web search on and on Gemini with grounding on, plus checks on Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity and Copilot.
| Prompt type | What it asks | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | The buyer's real questions. "Who are the best commercial roofing companies in Grand Rapids?" "Which swim school is best for a nervous four-year-old?" | Whether you are named, how often, in what position, and with what description |
| Decision-factor mining | "What should I look for when choosing a [category]?" "What matters most when comparing [product]?" | The criteria the engine uses to rank options, in its own words, so we can audit your pages against them |
| Competitor | "Compare [you] and [competitor]." "Who is better for [use case]?" | How the engine describes each of you, which sources it leans on, and where its verdict comes from |
| Fact check | "Does [you] offer [thing]?" "What does [you] cost?" "Where is [you] located?" | Where the engine is wrong about you, which it often is, and which page it would need to see to be corrected |
Every answer is saved with its citations and with the hidden searches the engine actually issued behind it. That last part is what most tools skip, and it is the part that tells you what to write.
Does the audit look at your own site?
Yes, but only after the engines have told us what matters. Once we have the decision factors, we go page by page through your site and check whether each factor is stated plainly, backed with a number or a named source, and placed where an engine can lift it. We call that the proof audit, and it tends to be humbling. A company might genuinely be the only certified installer in three counties and never say so in a sentence a machine could quote.
We then read the pages the engines are citing instead of you. Not to copy them, but to understand the shape of what gets picked: how early the answer appears, how many statistics sit in the first 300 words, whether there is a table, whether the author is named. Zhang and Yao's 2026 study of 21,000 citations found pages in the top quartile for list density were cited at 8.94 times the rate of the bottom quartile, and the gap for heading count was 12.5 times. Those are the patterns we are reading for.
Most audits we see are a dashboard screenshot and a score. Ours ends with the exact sentence a client needs to add to a specific page, and the prompt we will re-run to prove it worked. That is the difference between measuring the problem and fixing it.
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Can you tell me what I get at the end?
- Visibility scorecard by engine and by topic: how often you are named, where, and how you are described, with the raw answers attached.
- map of the searches the engines ran: the hidden sub-queries behind each buyer question, grouped into the topics you must own.
- Decision-factor list in the engines' own language, scored by how often each factor appears.
- Proof audit of your site against those factors, page by page, with the gaps marked.
- Citation read of the pages the engines trust for your topics, with the structural patterns they share.
- Fact-check log: everything the engines currently get wrong about you and the page that would correct each item.
- Ranked plan: the first 90 days of fixes, briefs and off-site work, ordered by expected effect on the prompt set.
- A one-hour readout with whoever owns the decision, and the prompt set itself so you can re-run it later.
Is three weeks realistic?
It is, because the heavy lifting is systematic rather than creative. Week one is intake, persona work and prompt-bank construction, and we need about two hours of your time in that week. Week two is the mining run, the citation reads and the proof audit. Week three is writing the plan and the readout. If you want us to include a second market or a second brand, add a week.
One caution on timing: a single snapshot can mislead. Aurora Intelligence's work on citation tracking found that one-off checks are unreliable because engines vary by phrasing and by session, which is why every prompt in our set is run more than once and why the scorecard shows a rate rather than a yes or no.
Will the audit tell me what it costs to fix the gaps?
It will tell you what the fixes are and how we would sequence them, and if you want us to do the work, the plan maps directly onto the GEO content program for on-site work and the citation and entity program for off-site work. Many clients take the plan and do the writing in-house, which is fine with us. The audit fee is quoted after a short scoping call, and it is credited against the first month if you continue into a program. .
Frequently asked questions
An SEO audit checks how Google ranks your pages. An AI search visibility audit checks how ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot answer your buyers' questions, which companies they name, which pages they cite, and which criteria they use. The two overlap less every quarter: Ahrefs measured the overlap between Google's top ten and AI Overview citations at 38% in March 2026.
Both. We use PromptWatch and Profound for ongoing tracking, and our own prompt miner for the retrieval-on runs across ChatGPT and Gemini, because the miner capture the engines' hidden searches and citations the dashboards do not show. The reading of cited pages and the proof audit of your site are done by a person.
Usually 60 to 120, split across visibility, decision-factor, competitor and fact-check prompts, each run more than once per engine so the scorecard shows a rate rather than a single snapshot.
About two hours in week one to talk through buyers, services, markets and competitors, read access to your analytics and Search Console, and a list of the claims you can prove. We do the rest.
Yes. Regional businesses often start with one market, and multi-location companies often audit one location to set the template before rolling it out.
You get the plan, the prompt set and the raw answers. You can run the fixes in-house, hand them to your agency, or continue with us in the GEO content program or the citation and entity program, where the audit fee is credited against the first month.