You would be amazed how many founders have never once asked ChatGPT the question their customers ask it every day. They obsess over their Google rankings, then find out an AI engine has been recommending their competitor by name for six months. This audit fixes that blind spot. It takes about thirty minutes, costs nothing, and by the end you will know exactly where you stand.
Grab a spreadsheet. Seriously, open one now, this works best if you actually do it along the way.
Step 1: Write your prompt panel (10 minutes)
You need ten questions, and the quality of the whole audit depends on them. Think about what someone types when they have budget and intent. A good panel mixes four types. Category questions like "best project management tool for construction teams". Comparison questions like "[you] vs [competitor], which is better". Problem questions like "how do I stop losing track of client approvals". And local or niche questions if they apply, like "best family law firm in Austin".
Write them the way a stressed person types, not the way a marketer writes keywords. Put one per row in your spreadsheet.
Step 2: Run the panel (15 minutes)
Ask each question in four places: ChatGPT (with web search enabled), Claude, Perplexity, and Google with AI Overviews. For each answer, record three columns. Named: which brands does the answer mention? Cited: which websites does it link as sources? You: do you appear as a name, as a citation, both, or not at all?
Two tips while you do this. Use a fresh chat for every question so earlier answers do not contaminate later ones. And note the sentiment when you do appear, because "X is a popular option though some users report slow support" is a different problem than not appearing at all.
Step 3: Read the citations, not just the names (5 minutes)
Now look at your Cited column across all forty answers. A pattern will jump out: the same handful of sources keeps getting cited. Usually it is a review platform, two or three listicle articles, sometimes Reddit, sometimes a niche publication. That list is your treasure map. Those exact pages are where the engines go to answer questions in your category, which means presence on those exact pages is worth more than almost anything else you could do this quarter.
Step 4: Check the plumbing (5 minutes)
Three quick technical checks. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended are not blocked. Search site:yoursite.com on Bing and confirm your key pages are indexed there, because ChatGPT retrieval runs on Bing. And google your own brand name to check the facts that come up (description, category, locations) match what your site says. Mismatched facts make engines hedge, and hedging engines cite someone else.
Step 5: Turn it into an action list
Your spreadsheet now tells you exactly what to do. If you were never named, your entity is weak: fix your consistency and corroboration first, starting with the sources from step 3. If you were named but never cited, your content is not retrievable enough: build a citable page for your money question, direct answer up top, stat included, schema underneath. If a competitor dominates the answers, look at where they are cited from and go earn presence in those same sources. Our guide on getting cited by ChatGPT walks through each of these fixes in order.
Step 6: Repeat monthly
Set a calendar slot and re run the same ten questions every month. Same questions, same engines, same columns. One snapshot is a curiosity. Six snapshots is a trend line you can actually manage against, and it is the only honest way to know whether your AI visibility work is working.
If you want it done properly
This DIY version is genuinely useful and we would rather you run it than not. The automated version is why we built MentionFlow: it samples every engine daily, tracks competitor share of voice over time, and keeps the verbatim receipts. The client version adds crawler log analysis and a prioritized roadmap. It is a standalone engagement, no retainer required. Details on the AI SEO page, and the wider methodology is covered in our GEO guide.