AI Brand Audit

An AI brand audit tells you exactly what AI thinks about your company right now. Not what you hope it thinks. Not what your marketing team assumes. What it actually says when real people ask real questions.

It's the starting point for any serious AI visibility strategy. You can't fix what you haven't measured.

What an Audit Covers

A proper AI brand audit examines five dimensions across multiple platforms.

Mention frequency. How often does AI mention you for relevant queries? If you're a CRM company and ChatGPT names you in 3 out of 20 CRM-related queries, that's a 15% brand mention rate. Now you have a baseline. Accuracy. Is what AI says about you actually true? This is where things get uncomfortable. AI might tell users your product doesn't have a feature that you shipped six months ago. It might cite outdated pricing. It might confuse you with a competitor. Inaccurate information in AI responses erodes trust with prospects who will never tell you why they didn't convert. Sentiment. Does AI recommend you or warn people away? There's a big difference between "Company X is a solid option for mid-market teams" and "Company X has had reliability issues." Check the AI brand sentiment across platforms. Competitive positioning. Where do you rank in AI's mental model of your category? Are you the first brand mentioned or the fifth? Do competitors appear in queries where you don't? This tells you where you're winning and where you're losing. Citation sources. What sources is AI drawing from when it talks about you? Old blog posts? G2 reviews? A Wikipedia stub? Knowing the inputs explains the outputs. If AI's opinion of you is based on a 2022 TechCrunch article and three mediocre G2 reviews, that's fixable.

How To Run One

Start with your most important queries. What would your ideal customer ask an AI assistant? "Best [your category] for [your segment]." "Alternatives to [your competitor]." "[Your product] vs [competitor]." Run 20-30 of these across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Document everything. Record the prompt, the response, whether you were mentioned, what was said, what competitors appeared, and what sources were cited. Do this systematically. A spreadsheet works fine. Dedicated tools like Renown work better.

Run the same queries multiple times. AI responses vary between sessions. A single run gives you a snapshot. Multiple runs give you a pattern. If you appear in 7 out of 10 runs for a given query, that's meaningfully different from 2 out of 10.

What To Do With the Results

The audit gives you a prioritized list of problems. Some common ones:

AI doesn't mention you for high-value category queries. Fix: build your presence on citation sources AI trusts for those topics. Get on G2, get mentioned in industry publications, create content that directly answers those queries.

AI says something inaccurate. Fix: update the sources AI is pulling from. If it's citing an old review, get newer reviews published. If your own website has outdated information, update it.

Competitors dominate. Fix: run a citation gap analysis to find the sources where competitors appear and you don't. Close those gaps.

The audit isn't a one-time exercise. AI changes constantly. Run it quarterly at minimum. Monthly is better. Track your numbers over time so you know whether your efforts are working.

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Related: AI Visibility | AI Brand Intelligence | AI Brand Sentiment