Link building
AI visibility audit
What an AI visibility audit actually measures, what the market sells, and how to tell a real report from a traffic estimate.
- Reading your visibility on daily trainer prompts
- Checking prompt volumes for the topic
- Reading the adidas brand kit and product lines
Across the 14 “best daily trainer” prompts, Nike is named in 88% of answers. adidas is named in 41%. The engines cite Runner’s World and Wirecutter, and you have no page that answers the question.
The topic runs at 5,400 searches a month and is climbing in the assistants. It earns a page of its own.
Your brand kit puts Supernova, not Adizero, in front of everyday runners, so the page leads with the Supernova Rise 3 and keeps Adizero for fast days. Headlines uppercase, adidas lowercase, and the one health claim is the APMA seal it holds. Staged in Documents. Nothing is published.
Run your
Fastest
Everyday.
Thanks to Dreamstrike+ cushioning the Supernova Rise 3 carries the easy miles that make up most of a training week, and keeps Adizero for the days the plan says fast. Nine weeks on our test panel sit behind every pick.
Find your daily trainer
Drafted by your AI Marketer from the Adidas brand kit and product lines. Staged in Documents, not published. Example on the sample account.
An AI visibility audit is a report on how often a brand or product is named in the answers generated by AI search engines like Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT, and what those answers say when a user asks a buying question in your category.
What it refuses to do
It will not find you a paid placement
“This reply asks for payment in exchange for a link. I will not write that response.”
It will not say a page is unlinked when it could not read it
“Unchecked: this page returned 403 and was not read.”
It will not send from a domain of ours
“No mailbox connected. Three drafts are ready and none of them has been sent.”
On this page5 sections
What an AI visibility audit is
The audit answers one question: when someone asks an AI engine a question your customers ask, does it name you, and what does it say? The engines measured are the ones people use: Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Microsoft Copilot, Grok, and DeepSeek are not yet trackable by any commercial tool.
An audit is not a forecast of traffic or rankings. It is a record of the answers that were actually generated. It shows your visibility, your share of voice among competitors, and your average position within those answers. This is a direct measurement, not an estimate.
Two channels exist. 'AI answer visibility' reads Google's surfaces only and reports the specific pages the AI cited, which you can then pitch for a link. 'Track answer engines' runs your prompts against all the engines on your plan on a schedule and keeps the answers. A provider focusing only on Google is doing the first. Mentionry does both.
What the market sells and how it works
Agencies sell audits as a one-time service, often bundled with strategy. Prices range from $500 to $5000. The deliverable is typically a PDF report analyzing a snapshot of your visibility across several engines, with recommendations to create content that answers the questions the AI is sourcing.
Some software platforms sell ongoing tracking as a feature of their suite. These often present dashboards with trend lines and competitor comparisons. They commonly charge from $100 to $300 a month. The data in these dashboards usually comes from scheduled queries run by the tool, similar to how Mentionry's Answer Engine Insights works.
A critical distinction is between measuring your own prompts and estimating industry volume. No tool on the market has a licensed opt-in panel to see what people are truly typing into ChatGPT. Any claim about 'how often people ask about hotels in Chicago' is an extrapolation, not a measurement. A real audit only measures the prompts you have chosen to track.
Risks and common misunderstandings
The largest risk is buying a report based on invented or extrapolated data. If a provider cannot show you the exact answer text and citations from a specific run, they are not providing an audit. They are providing a guess.
Another risk is assuming all engines are equal. Google AI Overviews have the largest reach by far, but the conversational models like Claude and ChatGPT shape research and consideration. A serious audit tracks the engines relevant to your buyers, not just one.
Finally, audits are often sold with a guarantee of improvement. Since no one can control AI output, any guarantee is about the vendor's actions, not the outcome. Mentionry sends pitches for opportunities found in the visibility data, but it never places or publishes a link. Whether a link appears is the publisher's decision.
- Believing historical data is available. Answers are generated live and exist only when captured. A provider cannot show you your visibility from six months ago unless they were tracking your specific prompts then.
- Confusing visibility with placement. An audit shows you where you stand. It does not place your brand in the answer. Improving visibility requires earning citations through the content you produce and the links you secure.
- Paying for per-placement promises. Some vendors sell on a per-placement basis, committing to a number of links or mentions. This often leads to paid placements, which violate search engine policies. Nothing in a genuine audit is promised.
How to judge an audit provider
Look for specificity. A real audit is built on your specific prompts, not industry keywords. The provider should ask you for the questions your buyers actually ask.
Check the methodology. They should clearly state that recording starts the day you begin, with no backfill. They should explain how they handle failed runs or engine errors.
Avoid any provider that uses the word 'guarantee' in relation to outcomes like rankings or mentions. Avoid providers that sell a specific number of links or placements. These are hallmarks of a low-quality, policy-violating service.
- Ask to see a sample report with raw data. It should include the exact prompt used, the answer text, the URLs cited, and the brands named.
- Confirm which engines are tracked. Can they show a recent run for ChatGPT? For Gemini? If they only track Google, that is a limitation you should understand.
- Ask how often data is refreshed. A monthly snapshot is very different from daily tracking. Gaps in data should be shown as gaps, not filled with zeros.
- Understand what happens after the audit. Do they offer a way to act on the findings, like pitching for links on the pages the AI cited? If so, how does that work?
What Mentionry does differently
Mentionry's Answer Engine Insights is the audit. You write the prompts. It runs them on a schedule, one reading per question per engine per day, which is the cadence the engines' own answers move at. Every answer text, citation, named brand, and searched query is written down and kept. From this record, it computes visibility, share of voice, and average position.
The audit is ongoing, not a snapshot. You see daily changes. A day when every run failed is reported as a gap in the chart. A brand that was never mentioned simply has no average position. The data is not invented or smoothed.
The audit is connected to action. The AI visibility channel reads the answer engines and shows you the pages they cited for your tracked prompts. Those pages are then fed into Opportunities as places where you could earn a citation. The drafted pitch is sent from your own connected mailbox, after your approval.
Mentionry starts with a free seven-day trial on your own site, then $99 a month for the Starter plan, which tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and writes the pitches. The full audit and outreach capability is on the Starter plan at $99 a month, and the first seven days are free. Enterprise is quoted. All are monthly prices, with an annual term available. You can see the published pricing ladder.
Nothing here is promised. Mentionry sends the pitch. It does not place, publish, or deliver a link. It finds the opportunity and drafts the email. You own the sending reputation and the reply thread. The result is a measured, actionable audit without invented statistics or fake case studies.
Questions people actually ask
An audit runs your specific prompts against the engines on your plan, records the text of the answer, the sites it cited, and the brands it named, then calculates visibility, share of voice, and average position from those records. It measures only the prompts you track, starting the day you add them, with no historical backfill.