AI search visibility audit (AEO / GEO) · United States
49% of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024, and looking up information is their top use case at 42% (Pew Research Center, n=5,119, February 2026). If your website is built in React, Angular or Vue without server-side rendering, those assistants cannot read it: the OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity crawlers do not execute JavaScript (Vercel/MERJ, 2024). We audit your site and tell you exactly what is blocking you.
Free diagnostic, no sales call first, no strings attached. All we need is your URL.
From USD 1,800
Three reasons, ordered by how often we find them in real audits.
| # | Cause | What triggers it | How to detect it | Time to fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your site does not render on the server | React, Angular or Vue SPA with no SSR and no prerender | curl -A "OAI-SearchBot" yoursite.com returns empty HTML | 2–6 weeks |
| 2 | You are blocking the bots that would cite you | Wildcard robots.txt rules, or Cloudflare with "Block AI bots" on by default | Bots receive 403 responses in your server logs | 1 day |
| 3 | Nobody mentions you outside your own site | No presence on YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, industry listicles or directories | Your brand is missing from answers; your competitor is not | 3–6 months |
Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and millions of AI answers. YouTube mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.737; branded web mentions at 0.656–0.709. Backlinks correlate so weakly that Ahrefs does not even publish a coefficient for them.
Ahrefs, December 2025
Being cited inside an AI Overview earns 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited, but still 38% fewer than having no AI Overview at all. AEO does not recover what you lost; it puts you on the winning side of a loss that is already happening.
Seer Interactive, 53 brands, 5.47M queries, February 2026
Six blocks. Block 2 is the one no marketing agency delivers, because it requires log access, CDN access and the ability to read a curl response.
| # | Block | What it contains |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Executive summary | Visibility score, share of answer, risk level and the 3 highest-impact actions. |
| 2 | Technical bot-accessibility audit | JavaScript-free rendering URL by URL, robots.txt, WAF and CDN, inherited nosnippet directives, 404s, sitemap, lastmod, TTFB, and server log analysis separating training crawlers, search crawlers and live retrieval fetchers. |
| 3 | Prompt universe and citation map | 60 to 120 real prompts per funnel stage, executed across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Who shows up, who does not, and which sources get cited. |
| 4 | Entity and earned media gap | Presence on Wikipedia, Wikidata, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, G2, Capterra and industry listicles. Where your competitor gets cited and you do not. |
| 5 | Content prioritization matrix | Which pages to rewrite and how: answer in the first 100 words, real HTML tables, sourced statistics, geo-legibility and the dominant format for your vertical. |
| 6 | 90-day roadmap | Prioritized by evidence and effort, with hour estimates and a fixed implementation budget. |
Delivery: Looker Studio dashboard + 12 to 18 page executive report. 10 to 15 business days.
No retainer. No master agreement. Fixed-scope project.
A full AEO audit costs from USD 1,800 in the United States, from 900 EUR in Spain and from USD 600 in Latin America. Price depends on the number of prompts analyzed (60 to 120), the number of engines queried (3 to 5) and the size of the site. The initial diagnostic is free and delivered within 48 hours.
| Tier | Price | Turnaround | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free diagnostic | USD 0 | 48 hours | Rendering test with OAI-SearchBot against your home page and 3 key URLs, robots.txt and WAF test, 10 prompts executed across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, a score out of 100 and the 3 most serious findings. |
| Full AEO audit | USD 1,800 – 2,900 | 10 – 15 business days | All 6 blocks, 60 to 120 prompts across 3 to 5 engines, log analysis, Looker Studio dashboard, executive report and 90-day roadmap. |
| Implementation | from USD 9,000 | Scope dependent | Migration to SSR or prerender (Angular, React, Vue, Next), content restructuring, schema, dynamic sitemaps, crawler and WAF configuration, and monthly monitoring. |
We applied this method to ignia.site before selling it. This page is prerendered on the server, returns full HTML to OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, and its source HTML is verified on every deploy by a script that fails the build if any bot receives anything other than a 200. In the Surfeo study, the vertical with the worst AI visibility of all was SEO agencies themselves, at 19 out of 100: the people selling AEO do not apply it to their own sites.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) means optimizing a website to be the answer that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews give, instead of ranking in a list of blue links. Classic SEO optimizes for the click; AEO optimizes for the mention and the citation inside a generated answer, where there is often no click but there is real influence over the buying decision.
AEO, GEO and LLMO name almost the same work with different emphasis. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the only one with a foundational paper: Princeton and IIT, published at KDD 2024. AEO predates LLMs and came out of voice search. Only 3% of buyers type "AEO" when looking for a vendor, versus 46% who type "AI search optimization" (Fractl, 343 U.S. marketing decision makers, July 2026).
A full AEO audit costs from USD 1,800 in the United States, from 900 EUR in Spain and from USD 600 in Latin America. Price depends on the number of prompts analyzed (60 to 120), the number of engines queried (3 to 5) and the size of the site. The initial diagnostic is free and delivered within 48 hours.
There are three common causes, in this order. First: the site is a React, Angular or Vue SPA with no server-side rendering, so the bot receives empty HTML. Second: the WAF or robots.txt blocks the very bots that would cite the site; in July 2026, 9.64% of AI bot requests received a 403 (Cloudflare). Third: nobody mentions the brand outside its own website, and external mentions are the signal that correlates most strongly with AI visibility.
No. GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot download JavaScript files but process them as text: they do not execute them (Vercel/MERJ, December 2024). Only Googlebot and AppleBot render JavaScript. A React, Angular or Vue site without server-side rendering is literally a blank page to ChatGPT.
No, based on the evidence available in August 2026. Ahrefs analyzed 137,210 domains and found that 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026. Google explicitly lists it as a misconception in its official documentation. Ignia does not bill llms.txt as an audit deliverable and explains in writing why.
Schema markup is not required. Google states it literally: "there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add". The only causally designed study on the topic (Ahrefs, 1,885 pages, May 2026) found no positive effect on citations. Schema remains useful for the Knowledge Graph and classic Google Search, but the fact you want AI to cite has to exist in the visible text of the page.
First visibility improvements show up between week four and week six; sustained gains between month two and month three. Technical fixes such as server-side rendering, WAF unblocking and robots.txt take effect sooner because they only depend on the bot re-crawling the site. External mentions, which carry the most weight, take three to six months.
Measurement is partial and that has to be said precisely. Since June 2026 Search Console reports AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions, but with no clicks, no CTR and no query-level data. GA4 has had a native "AI Assistant" channel since May 2026, but it cannot isolate AI Overviews traffic because the referrer stays google.com. Reliable measurement combines server logs by user-agent, scheduled execution of real prompts, and a "how did you hear about us" field on the form.
AI traffic converts better and is still marginal, and both halves matter. LLM traffic converts at roughly 18% and is the best converting source in the dataset, but it is under 2% of total referral and about 25 times smaller than SEO (Search Engine Land, 13 months of data, February 2026). Adobe Analytics measured a 92-point swing in 14 months: 38% worse in March 2025, 54% better in May 2026. Any vendor quoting a single multiplier without that context is selling you a number, not a finding.
No. Language models collapse more than 20 Spanish-speaking markets into undifferentiated answers, mixing regulatory frameworks and terminology (Search Engine Land, March 2026). Asked a tax question in Spanish, assistants return "RFC, NIF, SSN, depending on the country". That is why we work on geo-legibility: we name the country, the regulator and the ISO currency code explicitly in the visible text.
A marketing agency detects that a site does not render on the server; a development agency implements the fix. The number one cause of AI invisibility is technical: SPA without server-side rendering, WAF blocking bots, sitemaps without a real lastmod. Ignia is a development agency: we write the rendering code, the WAF rule and the sitemap endpoint. For editorial content and PR, a marketing agency will beat us, and we say so.
We are a development agency. There are two rows in this table we lose, and we leave them in.
| Problem | Marketing agency | Development agency |
|---|---|---|
| SPA that does not render on the server | Detects it, if they know how | Implements the fix: SSR or prerender |
| Cloudflare blocking OAI-SearchBot | Out of scope for them | WAF rule in 10 minutes |
| Server log analysis | Rarely has access | Daily work |
| Dynamic sitemap with real lastmod | CMS plugin | Endpoint reading the database |
| Editorial content restructuring | Their strength | Needs editorial support |
| Earned media and PR program | Their strength | Needs support |
You get a one-page report within 48 hours: whether the ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity bots can read your site, whether your WAF is blocking them, and which prompts in your category surface your competitor instead of you.
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+1 551 430 5133We reply during Lima business hours (GMT-5), which overlap with US Eastern and Central time.
