AI SEO audit: is AI recommending you, or your competitor?

You cannot fix what you cannot see

Your analytics will not tell you this. A person who asks an AI which company to use, gets a recommendation, and goes straight to that company never appears in your reporting as a lost sale. They appear as nothing at all.

That is what makes this different from every other kind of audit. There is no drop in the numbers to investigate and no bad month to explain. The business is simply going somewhere else, quietly, and the first sign is usually a competitor growing faster than they should be.

The report tells you which questions matter, where you stand on each one, and what to do about the ones you are losing.

One thing worth knowing if you are comparing this with anything else. Some AI visibility reports, including ones priced well above this one, work from your web address and nothing more. That makes them quick to produce, and it means any figure they put on what AI is worth to your business is a model rather than a measurement. We ask for your Analytics and Search Console instead, so the number you get is your own.

We did this to ourselves first

We own a niche in AI answers, on purpose

When we rebuilt this site we tested it properly rather than guessing. We took 18 questions a buyer would type, none of them mentioning us, and asked all four platforms live. That is 72 answers. We were named in 13 of them and cited as a source in 16.

On the question that matters most to us, who specialises in marketing for ski and snowboard rental businesses, we were named first on all four platforms and cited on all four. Twelve of our citations trace back to one article. That is what a deliberate niche looks like from the inside, and it is the same method we run for you.

Five articles, still working four months later

For a client in the snow sports trade we wrote and published a batch of long-form guides before the season. Four months on, with nothing more spent, five of them were being cited in at least 27 different questions across Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT. The questions behind them carry more than 19,000 searches a month between them.

They were quoted alongside the regional tourism body and the resorts themselves, as an independent operator. Content bought once, still being recommended a season later.

Cited by Google within a week of publishing

We wrote a plain-English guide to leaving a gift in a will for a New Zealand not-for-profit. Within a week of it going up, Google's AI Overview was answering the question with a definition drawn straight from that page, crediting them as the first source, ahead of household-name charities answering the same thing.

They did not pay for that position and it cannot be bought. It is what happens when the clearest answer on the internet to a question your donors are asking happens to be the one you published.

Named client work is published with their approval. Where a client is not named, that is their preference. Our own figures are from our own site, and the AI results were measured by asking the platforms directly rather than inferring them. Coverage of AI answers is a sample rather than a complete census, so citation counts are a floor, not a total.

Part of your marketing toolkit

The way people find and choose a business is changing, and it is still moving. Somebody who would once have run three searches and opened six tabs now asks one question and gets a shortlist back.

That moves the comparison. It used to happen across your website and two competitors' websites, where you had some say in it. Now a good deal of it happens inside the answer, before anyone visits anything. The buying journey has a stage in it that did not exist three years ago, and most marketing plans have not caught up.

So this is not a report to read once and file. It is meant to feed the work you are already doing.

• The content you write. Knowing which questions you lose, and to whom, is a content brief. You stop guessing what to publish next.
• Your content marketing plan. The questions worth winning are not always the keywords worth ranking for, and the gap between the two is where most plans are still stuck.
• The numbers you look at every month. AI referrals are a channel now. Most reporting either buries them in direct traffic or misses them entirely, so the first honest measure of it usually comes as a surprise.

If you take a joined-up view of your marketing, this belongs in it alongside your search, your content and your ads. It is not a separate thing off to the side, and it is not a novelty.

What happens after you buy

Buy the report, $995 USD →

1. You click the button and we take you to a payment page, where you enter your launch code if you have one.
2. You answer a short set of questions about your business and who you compete with.
3. We ask for read access to your Google Analytics and Search Console. It takes a couple of minutes and we tell you exactly where to click.
4. We build the list of questions to test, from what your buyers search for and ask, not from what sounds right. This is the part that decides whether the report is any use.
5. We run them across all four platforms, and record what comes back: whether you are named, which of your pages get cited, and who is recommended in your place.
6. We work out why, and what would change it.
7. You get the written report, and an hour on the phone going through it.

The Analytics and Search Console access matters, because it is what turns this from an interesting report into a useful one. It tells us how much business AI is already sending you and what those visitors do when they arrive, so the recommendations come with a number attached rather than a hunch.