Businesses can now run free audits to see exactly where their brand appears in AI-generated answers and identify gaps in visibility across Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google's AI features. A practical guide from The Rundown outlines a step-by-step process for measuring what AI search engines know about your company, using free tools and no technical expertise required.

The rise of AI search engines has created a new visibility challenge for businesses. Unlike traditional search engines where rankings are well understood, AI answer engines operate differently. They pull information from across the web to generate direct answers to user questions, often without prominently displaying where that information came from. This means a business could be mentioned in AI responses without the owner ever knowing it, or worse, described inaccurately.

What Are AEO and GEO, and Why Should You Care?

Two related concepts are reshaping how businesses think about online visibility. Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, focuses on making your information easy for AI systems to find and cite. Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, improves how your business and content appear in AI-generated answers. The practical question both address is simple: can someone looking for what you offer discover your business, and will the AI describe it correctly ?

The distinction matters because a business might rank well in Google's traditional search results but be invisible or misrepresented in ChatGPT or Perplexity responses. Conversely, a company could appear frequently in AI answers while having weak traditional search visibility. These are separate channels requiring separate strategies.

How to Run Your Own AI Visibility Audit?

The audit process uses four free tools to build a complete picture of your AI visibility. Each tool answers a different question about how AI systems perceive your brand.

• Peekaboo: Tests which AI products mention your business and whether the description is accurate. Visit peekaboo.com, enter your website URL, and review how the tool pulls your business name and description from your site before running the report.
• HubSpot AI Search Grader: Checks how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini describe your brand based on their training data. Enter your brand name, location, industry, and business description to see what each AI model knows about you without being prompted with your website.
• Semrush SEO Checker: Identifies technical website issues that might prevent AI systems from understanding your content. Enter your domain and review the Issues and Recommendations sections, treating flagged items as a starting list to investigate rather than confirmed problems.
• Google Search Console Generative AI Report: Shows which of your pages appear in Google's AI features and how many impressions they receive. Sign in with your Google account, select your website property, and navigate to Performance > Generative AI to see live data on your AI visibility in Google's ecosystem.

The key is keeping results from each tool separate. Peekaboo and HubSpot measure brand recognition by AI models, while Semrush and Google Search Console measure website health and Google-specific visibility. Averaging these scores together creates confusion; instead, create a one-page report documenting findings from each source with links to the original reports.

What Questions Should Your Business Answer in AI Search?

Once you understand where your brand appears, the next step is identifying which customer questions your website should answer. Think about what potential customers would ask before they know your company name. For a local newsletter covering Arlington, Virginia, useful questions might include "What newsletters cover events and local business in Arlington?" or "What is happening in Arlington this weekend?" For a garden store in Houston, "Where can I buy fertilizer in Houston?" connects a product to the geographic area the business serves.

The goal is building a short list of five to ten realistic questions that match what your business actually offers. For each question, identify whether an existing page on your website answers it, or note where a new page might be needed. This becomes your content roadmap for improving AI visibility.

Testing these questions directly in ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity, and Claude reveals how different AI systems answer them and which sources they cite. This comparison shows whether your website appears in the answers and whether the information is accurate. If your site doesn't appear for questions your customers are asking, that's a clear priority for improvement.

What Should You Do With Your Audit Results?

The audit findings become the foundation for a prioritized action plan. Rather than trying to fix everything at once, focus on three high-impact priorities: pages that should appear in AI answers but don't, inaccurate descriptions of your business that need correction, and technical issues preventing AI systems from crawling your content. Keep the original reports linked so you can compare future audits against this baseline and measure whether your changes actually improved visibility.

The broader shift here reflects how search behavior is changing. As more users turn to AI answer engines for quick responses, traditional search engine optimization alone is no longer sufficient. Businesses that understand how AI systems find and represent their information will have a competitive advantage in this new landscape. The tools and process outlined above make that assessment accessible to any business owner willing to spend an hour running free audits and reviewing the results.