An AI visibility audit is a structured benchmark of how AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — mention, cite, and describe your brand versus competitors. It combines prompt-set testing, citation-source analysis, and technical review into a baseline plus a prioritized roadmap. At Helix Apps it costs $4,500 and takes two weeks.
An AI visibility audit (you'll also see "AI search audit" or "GEO audit" — same engagement, different label) is a point-in-time diagnostic of your brand's presence in AI-generated answers. Where a traditional SEO audit asks "can search engines crawl and rank this site?", an AI visibility audit asks a harder set of questions: when buyers ask AI assistants the questions that lead to your category, do you appear? Are you cited as a source? How are you described? And who's winning the answers you're losing?
It's the diagnostic arm of answer engine optimization: everything AEO does — content, schema, entity work, citation-source outreach — should trace back to a gap the audit found and quantified.
Three reasons, and they compound:
In the audits we run at Helix Apps, the baseline regularly contradicts the client's assumptions — a competitor nobody worried about dominating recommendation prompts, or a "content problem" that turns out to be an entity problem. The roadmap that follows looks nothing like the plan the team walked in with.
Six components separate a real audit from an automated crawl report:
| Component | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Prompt-set benchmarking | Across a set of real buying-intent prompts, sampled repeatedly on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews: how often are you mentioned and cited, and how are you framed? |
| Competitor share of voice | On the same prompts, which competitors appear, how often, and with what sentiment — who owns the answers you want? |
| Citation-source analysis | Which third-party sites — review platforms, communities, publications — each engine actually cites in your category, and where you're absent. |
| Technical & schema review | Can AI crawlers access your site? Is structured data present, valid, and aligned with how engines parse entities and answers? |
| Entity audit | Is your brand described consistently across the web — name, category, capabilities — so models resolve you to the right entity with current facts? |
| Prioritized roadmap | Every finding ranked by expected impact and effort: what to fix first, what to build, what to ignore. |
If a provider's "audit" skips the benchmarking or the competitor comparison, you're buying a site crawl with an AI sticker on it.
Insist on artifacts you can reuse regardless of who executes next:
At Helix Apps, the AI Visibility Audit is $4,500 with a two-week turnaround, covering all six components above and the readout. Two weeks is the honest timeline: sampling each prompt multiple times per engine and scoring the outputs is manual analytical work, and it's exactly the work cheap audits skip.
For market context: largely automated audit reports are advertised anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars (Stackmatix's pricing survey, for example, observes ranges of roughly $250–$3,000), and they can be a reasonable smoke test. But an automated crawl can't read model outputs, score sentiment, or tell you which competitor owns which prompt — the parts that change your plan. Our full breakdown of what AEO engagements cost, audits included, is in the AEO pricing guide.
The audit is designed to make the next decision easy, whatever it is:
Either way, you exit the audit knowing where you stand, who's beating you, and what to do first. That's a position almost no B2B SaaS team is in today — and it's two weeks away. Book your AI Visibility Audit.
A rigorous AI visibility audit includes prompt-set benchmarking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews; competitor share-of-voice analysis; a citation-source analysis showing which third-party sites the engines trust in your category; a technical and schema review; an entity audit of how consistently the web describes your brand; and a prioritized roadmap ranking fixes by expected impact.
Helix Apps charges $4,500 for a practitioner-led AI visibility audit delivered in two weeks. Market pricing varies widely: largely automated audit reports are advertised for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, while rigorous manual benchmarking from specialist consultancies costs more. The differentiator is method — sampled prompt testing, competitor share of voice, and a prioritized roadmap rather than an automated crawl export.
A thorough AI search audit typically takes about two weeks. Prompt-set benchmarking is the pacing item: each prompt must be run multiple times per engine across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews to average out run-to-run variance, then scored for mentions, citations, and sentiment. Faster automated audits exist, but they trade sampling rigor and analysis depth for speed.
A GEO audit — generative engine optimization audit — is the same engagement as an AI visibility audit under a different label: a structured assessment of how generative AI engines mention, cite, and describe your brand, benchmarked against competitors. Some providers use GEO audit, others use AI search audit or AEO audit. Compare what the deliverable contains, not what it is called.
Yes, in practice. Without a dated baseline of your mention rate, citation rate, and share of voice, you cannot verify whether an agency's work changed anything — every later claim becomes unfalsifiable. An audit also produces the prioritized roadmap that should define the agency's scope, so you negotiate a retainer around known gaps instead of a generic playbook.
Audits, retainers, and project work — what answer engine optimization actually costs.
The questions to ask and the red flags that disqualify a provider fast.
How to measure brand mentions in LLMs: metrics, methodology, and tools.
The Helix Apps AI Visibility Audit — $4,500, delivered in 14 days — benchmarks your brand across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews and hands you the prioritized roadmap. Stop guessing where you stand.