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Run Your AI Visibility Baseline

25 min

What you'll be able to do

  • Build a fixed set of test questions that real customers would actually ask
  • Run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google, and score what comes back
  • Calculate your AI share of voice so you have a number to improve

▶ Video coming soon

Walkthrough for this lesson

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • You can't fix what you haven't measured. This lesson produces the number everything else is judged against
  • Use the exact same questions every month. Changing the questions makes the trend meaningless
  • AI answers are probabilistic, so run each question two or three times before you believe the result
  • Local AI answers usually name only one to three businesses, so the shortlist is far shorter than the old map pack
  • Write down every wrong fact you spot. Columbia's Tow Center found AI search tools answered incorrectly more than 60% of the time

Why you start with a number

It is tempting to skip straight to rewriting your website. Resist that. Without a baseline you will have no idea whether anything you do works, and two months from now you'll be guessing. Ten minutes of measuring today gives you a score you can watch move. It also usually delivers a jolt of motivation, because most owners discover the AI is either ignoring them entirely or saying something about them that isn't true.

The four kinds of questions to test

  • •Brand questions: “What is [your business] and what do they do?” This tests whether the engines know you exist and describe you correctly.
  • •Category questions: “Who offers [what you sell] in [your city]?” This is the big one. It's how a customer who has never heard of you would ask.
  • •Comparison questions: “[Your business] vs [a competitor]: which is better for [your type of customer]?” This shows how you're positioned against the people you compete with.
  • •Trust questions: “Is [your business] legitimate? Where are they based and what do they charge?” This is what a cautious buyer asks before calling, and it's where wrong facts do the most damage.

Step by step

  • •Run the AI Visibility Test Questions prompt below in any AI chatbot. Because your business profile is filled in, your details are already in place. It hands back ten ready-to-use test questions and nothing else to wade through.
  • •Open a fresh chat in each engine you're testing: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and a normal Google search to see whether an AI Overview appears. Use a fresh session with no earlier conversation, or the AI will just repeat what you already told it.
  • •Ask the same questions in each one, word for word. Copy each answer into a document as you go.
  • •Open the AI Visibility Scorecard prompt, paste the collected answers in, and let it score them and calculate your share of voice.
  • •Save the scored output to a document named “AI Visibility Scorecard - [Your Business] - [Date].” Keep the ten questions in their own document, because you'll re-run the exact same ones next month.

Run each question more than once

AI answers are not fixed. Ask the same question twice and you can get two different sets of businesses. That means a single run tells you very little, and it's the most common mistake people make when they check their AI visibility. Ask each question two or three times, in separate chats, and record what shows up consistently. What you're after is the pattern, not one lucky or unlucky answer.

Your score: AI share of voice

Share of voice is simply your mentions divided by all business mentions across your test set. If ten questions produce forty business mentions and five of them are you, your share of voice is 12.5%. The absolute number matters far less than the direction. Watching it go from 8% to 14% over two months is real progress and proof the work is paying off. Practitioners often aim for roughly 30%, or parity with the other names in your category, but start by beating your own last month.

Pay attention to who wins the answers you lose, too. Note the competitor named instead of you and, where the engine shows its sources, which page fed that mention. That list of winning sources is a free roadmap: it tells you exactly which directories, listicles, and community threads the engines trust in your category.

Keep a wrong-facts log

As you read the answers, you will almost certainly find things that are simply false: an old address, a price you haven't charged in years, a service you don't offer, or a claim you're closed. This is normal and widespread. When Columbia University's Tow Center tested 1,600 queries across eight AI search tools, the tools answered incorrectly more than 60% of the time. Write every error down with the engine that said it and the exact wording. The final lesson of this course is a workflow for hunting down where each wrong claim came from and fixing it at the source.

Put it into practice

Generate your ten test questions, run them across at least two engines with two runs each, score the answers with the AI Visibility Scorecard prompt, and save the result with today's date. That document is your benchmark for the rest of this course.

PROMPTS FOR THIS LESSON

Copy these into your AI tool. They auto-fill with your business profile. Browse the full library.

Local Marketing↻ Quarterly

AI Visibility Test Questions

Gives you back ten ready-to-use test questions - brand, category, comparison, and trust - phrased the way a real customer would type them. Just the list, nothing else to read.

Local Marketing↻ Quarterly

AI Visibility Test Questions

You are an AI search visibility analyst. I run a small business and I want to test whether AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) mention my business when customers ask about what I sell. HERE IS MY BUSINESS INFORMATION: - Business: [BUSINESS DESCRIPTION] - Primary product/service: [PRIMARY PRODUCT/SERVICE] - Geographic market: [CITY] - Target customer type: [TARGET CUSTOMER TYPE] - Known competitors: [KNOWN COMPETITORS] - Website: [WEBSITE URL] Write 10 test questions I can paste straight into an AI chatbot, phrased exactly the way a real customer would type them. Fill in my real details, city, and competitor names, so every question is ready to use as written. Use this mix: - 2 BRAND questions. Do the engines know I exist and describe me correctly? Shape: "What is [my business name] and what do they do?" - 4 CATEGORY questions. The most important type: a customer who has never heard of me, looking for what I sell. Do NOT put my business name in these. Shapes: "Who offers [my product/service] in [my city]?" and "What is the best [my product/service] provider for a [my target customer]?" - 2 COMPARISON questions, naming me against the competitors above. - 2 TRUST questions, the kind a cautious buyer asks before calling. Cover legitimacy, location, and pricing. OUTPUT FORMAT - follow this exactly: A single numbered list, 1 to 10, grouped under the four headings BRAND, CATEGORY, COMPARISON, TRUST. Each line is the question itself in quotes, then a dash and a maximum of eight words on what it tests. Example of one line: 3. "Who offers mobile dog grooming in Santa Ana?" - core category demand, no brand name No introduction, no summary, no advice, no explanation of your reasoning, and no testing instructions. The list is the entire response.
After you run this: You now have ten questions. Save them to a document named "AI Visibility Questions - [Business Name]" and use the exact same ten every month, or the trend means nothing. To test them: open a FRESH chat in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, plus a normal Google search to see if an AI Overview appears. Ask each question word for word, 2-3 times, and paste every answer into a document. Then run the AI Visibility Scorecard prompt on what you collected.
Local Marketing↻ Monthly

AI Visibility Scorecard

Paste in the answers you collected from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google, and get back a scored table, a visibility score out of 100, your share of voice against competitors, and a log of every wrong fact.

Local Marketing↻ Monthly

AI Visibility Scorecard

You are an AI search visibility analyst. I asked AI answer engines a fixed set of test questions about my industry and my business, and I am pasting their answers below. Score them. HERE IS MY BUSINESS INFORMATION: - Business: [BUSINESS DESCRIPTION] - Primary product/service: [PRIMARY PRODUCT/SERVICE] - Geographic market: [CITY] - Target customer type: [TARGET CUSTOMER TYPE] - Known competitors: [KNOWN COMPETITORS] - Website: [WEBSITE URL] HERE ARE THE ANSWERS I COLLECTED: [PASTE EVERY ANSWER HERE. For each one, write the question you asked, which engine answered it (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI Overview), and then the full answer text including any sources it cited. Keep every run separate, even when you asked the same question twice.] Score only what is in the answers above. Do not guess at results I did not paste, and do not invent what an engine "would probably" say. SECTION 1: SCORECARD A table with one row per question-and-engine pair. Columns: question, engine, was my business mentioned (yes/no), was my website cited (yes/no), position in the answer (first named / mentioned later / absent), and accuracy of what was said about me (accurate / partly wrong / wrong / not mentioned). SECTION 2: VISIBILITY SCORE A score out of 100 based on how often I was mentioned, how prominently, and how accurately. Show your reasoning in 2-3 sentences so I understand what is dragging the score down. SECTION 3: SHARE OF VOICE Count every business named across all the answers. Calculate my mentions divided by total business mentions, as a percentage. List the competitors who appeared, ranked by how often they were named. For any answer where a competitor was named and I was not, note which source the engine cited, if it showed one. SECTION 4: WRONG-FACTS LOG A table of every incorrect claim any engine made about my business: the engine, the exact wording it used, and what the truth is. If nothing was wrong, say so plainly. Do not soften or skip errors, this list is the most valuable output here. SECTION 5: TOP 3 PRIORITIES Based only on what the results actually show, the three things that would most improve my visibility next month. Be specific and concrete, not general advice.
After you run this: Save the full output to a document named "AI Visibility Scorecard - [Business Name] - [Date]." Re-run it monthly using the exact same test questions, or the trend means nothing. Keep the wrong-facts log: you will use it in the AI Fact-Correction prompt.

What's next

Next: make sure AI can actually reach your site at all, because if it can't, nothing else you do here will land.