A growing share of buying research never touches a results page: someone asks an AI engine for the best option and reads one answer. If you are not in that answer, a competitor is, and no analytics tool shows you the deals you never entered. This audit makes the invisible measurable.
From your market and site, we build the question set a real buyer asks an engine: brand checks, best-of lists, category and review queries.
Each query runs against each engine and the full answers are captured as evidence, including retrieving the actual sources behind Google's AI Overviews rather than assuming them.
Cited, mentioned or invisible is decided by matching against the captured answers, not by an AI's opinion of an AI. What cannot be measured is declared a gap, never guessed.
The four pillar scores compute from the evidence by rules, so the same evidence always produces the same score. Your next audit is comparable to this one.
An automated verifier recomputes every score and checks every claim against evidence, then the adversarial human review. Reports that cannot prove themselves do not ship.
It is for brands whose buyers research before buying: SaaS, services, anything with a comparison phase. If your customers ask ChatGPT for recommendations, and they do, this is the visibility you cannot see from Search Console.
It is not for pre-launch sites with no footprint yet; the engines have nothing to cite and the audit would mostly measure absence. Build the foundation first, the Growth Plan sequences that correctly.
Confirming your market, competitors worth tracking, and any queries you want included. Nothing else needed.
Engines are queried, sources retrieved, evidence captured. Progress visible in your dashboard.
The automated verifier, then the hostile human review.
Report in your dashboard, one revision round included.
| Alternative | Typical cost | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| "AI visibility" tool subscriptions | $100 to $400/mo | Volume metrics without judgment or a roadmap |
| Asking ChatGPT about yourself | Free | One engine, one day, no rubric, no competitors, no reproducibility |
| Agency AEO retainers | $2,000+/mo | Often this exact audit, spread across a quarter |
Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews with full source retrieval today. Engines we cannot yet measure are listed as explicit gaps in your report, because guessing would poison the score.
Deterministically: captured answers are matched for your brand and domain. No model grades another model. The same evidence always produces the same verdict.
Then you learned it for $975 instead of discovering it in pipeline numbers. The report pairs every gap with the fix, and the strengths section shows what to build on.
Engines drift monthly. One audit sets the baseline; AI Citation Monitoring at $295/mo watches the drift and flags misrepresentations.
Yes: AEO Optimization implements the entity, schema, llms.txt and content work, then re-measures against this baseline.