Guides/Technical fixesupdated 2026-08-04 · 4 min

The 15-Point AI Visibility Audit You Can Run Yourself

The short answer

Fifteen checks covering crawler access, rendering, schema, profile completeness, listing consistency, entity breadth, content structure, and reviews. Most take under five minutes and require no tools. The first three account for the majority of businesses that score zero across every assistant.

Ninety minutes, no tools, no cost. Work down the list in order — the ordering is deliberate, and the first three checks explain most businesses that score zero everywhere.

Technical foundation

1. Are AI crawlers blocked?

How: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. (Why blocking AI crawlers is self-harm for a local business.)

Fail if: any Disallow appears under GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, CCBot, or Bingbot. Also fail if you see User-agent: * followed by Disallow: /.

Also check: your security plugin's settings and Cloudflare's bot controls, which can block at the network level regardless of what the file says.

Time: 5 minutes. Impact: total. This alone can produce a zero across every assistant.

2. Does your content exist in raw HTML?

How: right-click your homepage → View Page Source (not Inspect). Search for your phone number, a service name, and your city.

Fail if: you find an empty <div id="root"> and a script tag, and none of the three searches match.

Repeat for: your top three service pages.

Time: 5 minutes. Impact: total.

3. Is your site fast enough to be read?

How: run PageSpeed Insights, or simply load your site on mobile data and count.

Fail if: server response takes more than a few seconds. Crawlers time out.

Time: 5 minutes.

Structured data

4. Do you have LocalBusiness schema?

How: View Page Source, search for application/ld+json. Or paste your URL into Google's Rich Results Test.

Fail if: none exists, it uses generic LocalBusiness when a specific type is available for your trade, or it contains errors.

Time: 10 minutes.

5. Does your schema list every city you serve?

How: find the areaServed field.

Fail if: it is missing, or lists fewer cities than you actually serve.

Time: 2 minutes.

6. Does your schema link your other profiles?

How: find the sameAs array.

Fail if: missing or nearly empty. It should list your Google Maps URL, Yelp, Facebook, BBB, and every association and manufacturer listing you hold.

Time: 2 minutes. Impact: high, and almost universally failed.

7. Do you have FAQ content with FAQPage schema?

How: check your main service pages for question headings with direct answers, and confirm FAQPage schema wraps them.

Fail if: no question-format content, or FAQs without schema, or schema whose text does not match the visible page.

Time: 10 minutes.

Google Business Profile

8. Is every profile field filled?

How: open your profile and go field by field.

Fail if any of these are empty or thin: secondary categories, individual services with descriptions, service areas as named cities, business description, holiday hours, attributes, Q&A, photos from this quarter.

Time: 15 minutes to audit. Impact: highest of any single item.

9. Is your primary category as specific as possible?

How: compare your category against the full list, and against what your best-performing competitors use.

Fail if: you are using a broad category when a specific one exists.

Time: 5 minutes.

Consistency and entity

10. Do your listings agree with each other?

How: search your business name, your phone number, your old phone number, and your old address. Open the first ten results and compare name, address, phone, and hours.

Fail if: any two disagree.

Time: 15 minutes. Impact: high.

11. How many independent mentions do you have?

How: search "Your Business Name" in quotes. Count results that are not your own website or social accounts.

Fail if: fewer than eight.

Time: 5 minutes.

12. Are you in the verifiable directories?

How: check whether you appear, correctly, in your state license lookup, your trade association's member directory, and every manufacturer dealer or certified-installer locator you qualify for.

Fail if: you qualify and are not listed, or the listing has wrong details.

Time: 15 minutes. Impact: high, and rarely claimed by competitors.

Content and reviews

13. Is your content answer-first?

How: open your top five pages. For each heading, read the first sentence underneath.

Fail if: the first sentence is preamble rather than a direct answer, or if headings are labels ("Our Services") rather than questions.

Time: 10 minutes.

14. Do you publish real prices?

How: look for actual numbers with the variables explained.

Fail if: your pricing page says "contact us for a free quote" and nothing else.

Time: 2 minutes. Impact: high and consistently skipped.

15. Do your reviews say anything specific?

How: read your last twenty reviews. Count how many name a specific service.

Fail if: fewer than a quarter of them do. Also fail if your newest review is more than three months old, or if any review is unanswered.

Time: 10 minutes.

Scoring it

Count your failures.

0–2 failures. You are in good shape. Focus on entity breadth and content.

3–6 failures. Typical. Work down the list in order; the fixes are mostly free.

7–10 failures. Also typical, and mostly good news — the gains are large and cheap.

11+ failures. Start with checks 1, 2, and 8. Those three account for most of the difference.

The order to fix them

  1. Checks 1–3 — technical unblocking. Nothing else matters until these pass.
  2. Check 8 — Google Business Profile. Highest impact per hour.
  3. Checks 4–7 — schema.
  4. Checks 10–12 — consistency and entity.
  5. Checks 13–15 — content and reviews, ongoing.

Re-running it

  • Quarterly: checks 1, 2, 10, 15. These drift without anyone deciding they should.
  • Twice a year: the full audit.
  • After any site change: checks 1, 2, and 4.

The automated version

Our free scan runs the on-page portion of this audit automatically alongside twenty-five real customer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — so you get both the diagnosis and the outcome in one pass.

About fifteen seconds, free, no account. Use it to confirm what the manual audit found.

Common questions

How long does this audit take?
About ninety minutes end to end if you do it in one sitting. The first three checks take fifteen minutes and are the ones most likely to reveal a serious problem, so start there even if you cannot do the rest today.
Do I need any paid tools?
No. Everything here uses a browser, Google's free Rich Results Test, and free AI assistant accounts. The only optional cost is time.
What if I fail most of these?
That is normal and it is good news — it means the gains are available and cheap. Work down the list in order. The first five checks produce most of the improvement for a fraction of the effort.
How often should I re-run it?
Fully, twice a year. Checks 1, 2, 10, and 15 quarterly, because crawler blocks, rendering changes, listing drift, and review patterns all change without anyone deciding they should.
Stop guessing

See exactly what the five AIs say about your business.

Twenty-five real customer questions across Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Free, about fifteen seconds, no account.

Run the free scan

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