How to Audit Your Site's AI Visibility in 30 Minutes

The most common question we hear from founders is: I know my brand should be getting cited, but it is not. Where do I start?

This is a 30-minute audit that gives you a clear answer. No paid tools required for the first pass.

STAT: 67% of B2B SaaS brands have at least one critical AEO blocker that can be fixed in under 2 hours. Source: CiteAgentic Audit Data, 2025

Before you start: define your prompt set

An AEO audit is meaningless without a defined set of buyer prompts — the exact questions your ideal customer would type into ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Good prompts (buyer-intent, specific):

• "What is the best tool to track whether my brand is mentioned in AI search results?"
• "How do I get my SaaS cited by ChatGPT?"

Bad prompts (too broad): "AI search", "SEO", "marketing software"

Write down 10 prompts. They will be your measurement baseline.

Step 1: Run the prompts (5 minutes)

Open ChatGPT and Perplexity. Run each of your 10 prompts. Record: does your brand appear? If yes, is it cited prominently? If no, which competitor appears instead?

This is your AEO baseline. Even one pass gives you the single most important data point: your current citation share.

TAKEAWAY: Take a screenshot of every prompt result today and date it. In 60 days, run the same prompts again. The before/after comparison is the most compelling evidence of AEO ROI you can show to stakeholders.

Step 2: Check robots.txt (2 minutes)

Visit https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for rules blocking AI crawlers.

RESEARCH: In our audit of 500 B2B SaaS sites, 23% were inadvertently blocking at least one major AI crawler via overly broad robots.txt rules. Source: CiteAgentic, 2025

If any of these are blocked by your robots.txt, that is your highest-priority fix.

Step 3: Audit structured data (5 minutes)

Go to Google Rich Results Test and test: your homepage (needs Organization + sameAs), your most important blog post (needs Article + FAQPage), your product page (needs SoftwareApplication or Product).

STAT: Only 31% of B2B SaaS homepages have valid Organization schema with a populated sameAs array. Source: CiteAgentic Audit Data, 2025

Step 4: Check llms.txt (1 minute)

Visit https://yourdomain.com/llms.txt. A 404 means you do not have one. It takes less than an hour to add and should be your next step after fixing any crawl blocks.

Step 5: Check off-site mentions (5 minutes)

Search: site:reddit.com "your brand name", site:news.ycombinator.com "your brand name", Google News with your brand name filtered to Past year.

Fewer than 5 genuine mentions across all platforms is a red flag. LLMs are trained on these conversations — if your brand does not exist in them, it does not exist in the model's prior.

Step 6: Content structure spot-check (5 minutes)

Open your most important content page. Check:

• Does it have H2/H3 headings that mirror buyer question phrasing?
• Does it have a dedicated FAQ section?
• Is the primary answer stated clearly in the first 100 words?
• Is the content accessible without JavaScript?

Step 7: Freshness check (2 minutes)

Find your top 5 most-linked content pages. Any page last updated more than 18 months ago targeting time-sensitive topics needs a refresh.

Prioritising your findings

TAKEAWAY: Fix the top 3 technical issues first — robots.txt, Organization schema, FAQPage schema. These have the shortest time-to-impact and require zero content creation.

FAQ

How do I know if my robots.txt is blocking AI crawlers?

The most reliable method: visit https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for "Disallow: /" under a wildcard User-agent or under a specific AI crawler user agent. Also check your CDN or security settings (Cloudflare, Vercel) for bot-blocking rules — these override robots.txt.

What if my brand does not appear in any prompt at all?

This is common for newer brands. Focus on Perplexity first — it uses live retrieval, so recent content can get cited within days. Publish 5 well-structured FAQ-format articles and check again in 30 days.

How many prompts should I track?

Start with 10–20. Over time, expand to 50–100 prompts covering all stages of the buyer journey. Tools like CiteAgentic automate this tracking across multiple engines simultaneously.