09. AI Search
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews are recommending products to your buyers right now. We measure exactly when your brand gets cited, when it gets ignored, and when a competitor gets the recommendation that should have been yours.
In plain words
An AI search audit measures how visible your store is inside AI answers: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews can crawl you, how often they cite you, what they say about your products, and which competitors they recommend instead. It covers AI-crawler access, schema markup coverage, content extractability, and brand-mention sentiment, the inputs answer engines use to decide who gets named.
How your brand currently surfaces in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, tested across hundreds of buying searches your customers actually run. Where you're cited, where you're missing, where a competitor gets the recommendation.
Where AI engines pull their answers about your category from. The publications, review sites, and forums that AI treats as sources of truth, and which of them currently mention you.
How well-defined your brand is in the form AI search engines can read. Wikipedia, Wikidata, Google Knowledge Graph, schema cross-references. (Operator term: entity audit.)
The reviews, expert mentions, third-party data, and case studies AI engines use to decide whether to trust your claims. What you have, what's missing, where to invest first.
Side-by-side AI search performance vs. your top three competitors. How often each of you gets cited, in what context, and how accurately.
The three highest-impact actions to get cited by AI search this quarter. With effort, owner, and forecast attached.
How it ships
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended tested against your robots.txt and CDN rules, because one blocked crawler removes you from that engine entirely.
Your citation share, sentiment, and product accuracy measured across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews for the buying queries in your category.
How liftable your catalogue is: structured data coverage, content structure, spec consistency between site and feeds, scored page by page.
Every query where an assistant recommends a competitor, documented with the reason and the fix, ranked by the cited demand it unlocks.
Go deeper
You can't improve a channel you can't see. This makes AI visibility measurable.
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended each obey robots.txt and CDN bot rules differently. One blocked crawler removes you from that engine's answer pool entirely. We test access per crawler, because the most common AI visibility problem is a setting nobody knew about. Fixing that crawler access lives in ecommerce technical SEO.
Across the buying questions in your category, how often do ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews name you, and what do they say? We benchmark citation share against competitors and score sentiment, because being mentioned as the cautionary tale isn't visibility worth having. A sudden collapse in citations behaves like any other traffic loss, diagnosed the same way as ecommerce traffic recovery.
Answer engines lift facts from pages they can parse cleanly: clear headings, question-shaped sections, complete Product schema, consistent specs between your site and your feeds. We audit how liftable your catalogue is and flag every page where a model would have to guess.
For every query where an assistant recommends a competitor instead of you, there's a reason in their data, content, or authority. We document each gap and rank the fixes by how much cited demand they unlock, so the strategy starts with a scoreboard, not a hunch. That scoreboard feeds straight into an ecommerce AI search strategy.
FAQ
Same foundations, different scoreboard. Crawlability, structure, and trust feed both, but AI answers reward extractable facts and consistent brand data over position. The audit measures the AI side specifically: access, citations, sentiment, and extractability.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews, plus the crawlers behind them: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. Coverage shifts as the market does, and the audit shifts with it.
We run your category's buying questions through each engine on a fixed schedule and log who gets named, in what context, with what sentiment. That produces a citation share you can track like a ranking, benchmarked against competitors.
Strong SEO helps but doesn't guarantee citations: most sources cited in AI Overviews don't rank in the organic top ten for the same query. The audit tells you whether your SEO strength is actually transferring to the AI surface, and what's blocking it where it isn't.
Where this fits
Ships inside our AEO practice, where being the answer is the entire job.
SEEN IN THE FIELD842 ChatGPT citations
Every service here is one moving part of the system we run at Search Offgrid.