To audit your brand’s visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, you must move beyond traditional SEO metrics like "blue-link" rankings and focus on Share of Model and citation frequency [1], [2].
Our team recommends the following structured assessment:
1. Conduct a "Share of Model" Analysis
You must measure how often and how favorably your brand appears in synthesized answers for the queries your buyers actually run [1].
- Non-Branded Queries: Prompt the engines for "best [category] software/service" to see if you are included in the consideration set [2].
- Branded/Comparison Queries: Run prompts like "[Competitor] vs [Your Brand]" to see how the model differentiates your features and value proposition [2].
- Sentiment Tracking: Document the specific adjectives the models attach to your brand (e.g., "leader," "option," or "newcomer") to establish an AI Sentiment Score [2], [5].
2. Measure Engine-Specific Citation Metrics
Each engine weights signals differently, so your audit must track them individually:
- Perplexity: Measure your Citation Share. Perplexity cites the most sources (5–15 per answer), making it the easiest surface to track measurable citation rates [4].
- Gemini: Check your Google Organic Position. Gemini weights traditional organic ranking higher than any other chat surface; a strong classic SEO foundation is the primary driver here [4].
- ChatGPT: Verify if the engine provides a direct, clickable citation back to your domain. Success depends on being part of the model's "mental model" or retrieval layer [1], [2].
3. Technical & Authority Signal Check
A comprehensive audit must verify the "consensus of signals" that AI engines use to choose sources:
- Technical Readiness: Confirm you have a clean llms.txt file mapping your important pages and complete Schema markup (Organization, Article, FAQPage) [3].
- Bot Access: Ensure your Web Application Firewall (WAF) is not blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended [4].
- Third-Party Signals: Audit your presence in "Tier-1" sources. Claude, for instance, weights Wikipedia and Tier-1 journalism (Reuters, Bloomberg) more heavily than other inputs [4].
4. Use Specialized Tooling
While manual prompting in "clean environments" (APIs or zero-history incognito sessions) is necessary to prevent bias, you can use tools like Profound, Peec AI, or Otterly.AI to track directional data on how often your brand appears across these platforms [2], [3].
Next Step: Review our full AI Visibility Audit glossary page to understand the specific metrics required to survive the zero-click era.