An AI visibility audit is a structured check of what AI assistants say about your practice, and why. It looks at whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers name your firm when a client asks for an accountant in your town, whether what they say is accurate, and what on your website and across the web is helping or getting in the way.

Most practices do not need a large report. They need to know where they stand and what to fix first. A good audit gives you exactly that.

What an AI visibility audit should check

What the assistants actually say. The starting point is asking the questions a client would ask, in more than one assistant, more than once. "Can you recommend an accountant in Bolton for a small limited company?" and "What do you know about [your practice]?" tell you different things. The audit should record which firms were named, whether yours was one of them, and whether anything said about you was wrong.

The sources behind the answer. When ChatGPT searches the web, it shows the pages it used. Those citations are the most useful part of the test, because they show what the assistant was reading when it named a competitor instead of you.

Whether your site can be reached at all. OpenAI's guide to its crawlers explains that a site can allow OAI-SearchBot so it can appear in ChatGPT search results, separately from GPTBot, which relates to training. A robots.txt file that blocks the wrong one, often added by a plugin or a developer years ago, can keep a practice out of ChatGPT search without anyone noticing.

What your pages say. An assistant can only describe what is written down. The audit should check that your site states plainly which clients you look after, which services you offer and which towns you cover, on pages of their own rather than in one line on the homepage.

Your details everywhere else. Your Google Business Profile, professional body listings, directories and reviews all give assistants something to find. The audit should check that your name, address and phone number agree across them. Google's guidance on how local results are ranked says prominence is partly based on links and reviews, and those same pages are part of the open web assistants draw on.

Google's AI answers. Google says in its guide to AI features in Search that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond normal SEO good practice. So this part of the audit is really a check on your SEO foundations. Google also says clicks from AI features are counted in the Search Console Performance report, under the Web search type, so you can see that traffic in a tool you may already have.

What a useful audit leaves you with

You should come away with three things: a clear record of what each assistant said, a short list of the gaps behind it, and the order to fix them in. If an audit hands you a long score with no plain next step, it has not done its job.

Be wary of anyone who says an audit or a fix can make an assistant recommend you. Nobody controls those answers, and they change from one run to the next. What you can control is how clearly and consistently your practice is described.

Does your practice need one?

Probably, if any of these are true:

  • You have never checked what an assistant says about your firm.
  • A client mentioned finding a competitor through ChatGPT.
  • Your website has not been updated in a few years.
  • You have moved office, changed your name or added services.

If you would like to start yourself, our guide to checking whether ChatGPT recommends your practice walks through the test by hand. Our free AI visibility checker asks Gemini about your firm and town and emails you the answer, with a short scorecard of what is working and what is holding you back.

If you are thinking of paying someone for the work, our guide to choosing an SEO agency for your practice covers the questions to ask first, and our SEO service for accountants covers the pages, profiles and listings an audit usually points to.

Want a second opinion?

Run the free checker, then get in touch and tell us what came back. We will tell you plainly what we would look at first.

Common questions

How is an AI visibility audit different from an SEO audit?

They overlap a lot. An SEO audit looks at how your site performs in Google's ordinary results. An AI visibility audit adds what assistants say about you and the wider web they read, such as listings and reviews.

How often should I check?

Answers change over time, so a quick check every few months is sensible, and again after any big change to your website or listings.