AI search audit: see exactly how AI assistants answer your buyers
An AI search audit shows you how ChatGPT actually answers your buyers' questions — and whether your brand appears in those answers. AnswerMonk's audit is free: enter your URL at answermonk.ai, no signup, results in 3-8 minutes.
There is no email gate and no sales call between you and the results. The audit generates the buyer prompts in your category — the "best tool for" questions, the comparison questions, the alternatives questions — runs them on ChatGPT across three search modes, and returns an appearance rate, a competitor leaderboard, and a citation-source breakdown. Public example reports live at /reports, and the full method is documented at /methodology.
What the audit checks
The audit tells you how often you appear, who beats you, which brand each search mode favors, where the winners' citations come from, and which facts AI gets wrong about you.
| Deliverable | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Appearance rate | How often does your brand show up when buyers ask AI for recommendations in your category? |
| Competitor leaderboard | Which brands do the engines actually recommend, ranked — and where do you sit among them? |
| Citation-source breakdown | Which pages, publications, and directories do the engines cite when they answer? |
| Per-mode leaders | Which brand does each search mode favor — because search-off, model-decides, and search-forced answers rarely agree? |
| Claims checker | Which facts is AI getting wrong about your brand, and where did each claim come from? |
The appearance rate and the leaderboard set the baseline: not a vague score, but a measured share of real buyer prompts where your brand shows up, next to the brands that show up instead of you. The citation-source breakdown is where the work starts. Engines do not recommend brands out of goodwill; they assemble answers from sources, and the report names which sources are carrying the current winners. The winners playbook turns that into targets — which sources carry the winning brands, and where you could get listed.
The claims checker deserves its own mention. When an engine states something wrong about your brand — a discontinued product, an old price, a feature you never had — the report flags the claim with per-claim provenance, so you can trace where the error likely came from and fix the source instead of arguing with a chatbot.
Why single spot-checks mislead
Asking ChatGPT once and screenshotting the result is not a measurement, because AI answers shift with phrasing, engine settings, and whether the model searched the web or answered from memory.
We tested this directly. The result from our 300-probe phrasing study: two engine presets agreed on category winners only 22% of the time. Ask the same question a slightly different way, or in a different mode, and you often get a different winner. Memory makes it worse. The finding from our 2,994-probe July 2026 study across 19 categories: 30.1% of answers cited zero sources (pure model memory). When that happens, the engine is not reading the live web at all — it is reciting what it absorbed in training, and a single screenshot cannot tell you which kind of answer you got. That is why the audit runs a spread of prompts across three search modes and reports rates, not anecdotes.
What happens after the audit
The free report is complete on its own; if you want ongoing help acting on it, the paid tier is $19/month.
The $19/month tier adds plain-language action plans, a living knowledge base that tracks Schema.org, Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity guidance as it changes, a source-placement agent, and WhatsApp lead capture. What it does not include is a guarantee: nobody can honestly promise you a spot in AI answers, and we do not. What you get is a clear measurement, a ranked view of what the winners in your category are doing differently, and the option to rerun the free audit any time to see whether the needle moved.
How this differs from an SEO audit
An SEO audit measures your Google rankings; an AI search audit measures whether AI assistants recommend you — overlapping inputs, different scoreboard.
The overlap is real. Per Seer Interactive: ~87% of ChatGPT Search citations align with Bing's top organic results. But the differences bite. Per industry analyses: ~90% of pages ChatGPT cites rank on Google page 3 or beyond — pages your SEO report writes off can be exactly what an engine quotes. The inputs differ too. From Ahrefs' 75,000-brand analysis: branded mentions correlate 0.664 with AI visibility vs 0.218 for backlinks. Rankings reward links; AI answers reward being talked about in the places engines read. For the full comparison, read GEO vs SEO.
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Frequently asked questions
Is the AnswerMonk AI search audit really free?
Yes. You enter your URL at answermonk.ai and get the full report with no signup and no payment details. Results arrive in 3-8 minutes. The paid tier at $19/month is optional and adds ongoing help acting on the report.
Which AI engine does AnswerMonk audit?
The audit runs your category's buyer prompts on ChatGPT across three search modes. It reports an appearance rate, a competitor leaderboard, and a citation-source breakdown, plus which brand each search mode favors.
Why not just ask ChatGPT about my brand myself?
A single chat is an anecdote, not a measurement. Answers shift with phrasing and with whether the model searches the web or answers from memory. The audit runs a spread of prompts across three search modes and reports rates, so you learn how often you appear rather than how you did once.
Does AnswerMonk guarantee my brand will appear in AI answers?
No, and you should distrust anyone who does. Engines change their sources and behavior without notice. AnswerMonk gives you a measurement, the sources carrying the current winners, and a plan — the outcome depends on doing the work.
What does AnswerMonk cost after the free audit?
The audit itself stays free, and you can rerun it whenever you like. The paid tier is $19/month and adds plain-language action plans, a living knowledge base tracking Schema.org, Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity guidance, a source-placement agent, and WhatsApp lead capture.
Run a free AI visibility audit for your brand at answermonk.ai