The AI Visibility Audit: Understanding Your Score

The AI Visibility Audit is your brand's comprehensive health check for the AI era. It answers: "If someone asks an AI about your industry, will it recommend you?"

The dashboard has six named evidence areas. The table shows reference weights, rather than a promise that every area is measured in each audit:

AI Presence carries the most weight because it is the most direct outcome measure. The reference weights shown above can adapt by industry and audit scope. The free audit checks three core signal groups: Citations, AI Presence, and On-Page foundations. The full audit also checks Entities and applicable Reviews. Press is coming soon and is not part of the current score. Check the saved audit for its applied scope and weighting.

Citations (10% in the default model) Scans Google for Reddit, Quora, and Facebook Group threads matching your keywords. Checks whether your brand is mentioned in those threads, and whether competitors are. A client with 0 mentions in 142 threads where competitors appear 47 times has a massive citation gap.

Scoring factors: Brand mention rate (40%), competitor dominance ratio (30%), opportunity density (30%).

AI Presence (30% of composite) Sends buying-intent prompts to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Checks each response for brand mentions, recommendations, and link citations. This is the most direct measure of your AI visibility.

Scoring factors: Overall mention rate (50%), recommendation rate (30%), link citation rate (20%).

Entities (25% in the default model) Checks your brand's presence and consistency across Google Business, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikipedia, industry directories, and social profiles. Also checks your website for schema markup (Organization, Product, FAQ). Inconsistencies confuse AI models.

Scoring factors: Platform coverage (25%), description consistency (35%), schema completeness (20%), knowledge panel presence (20%).

Reviews (15% of composite) Scans Google Reviews, Trustpilot, G2, Capterra, and industry-specific platforms. Measures total volume, average rating, review recency, and velocity compared to competitors.

Scoring factors: Platform coverage (20%), rating score (25%), volume (25%), recency (15%), velocity vs competitors (15%).

On-Page (10% in the default model) Checks technical accessibility, structured data, content freshness, and whether important pages provide clear, extractable answers. Outrigger prepares schema and citability improvements for review; your team controls implementation.

Press (10% reference weight) Press is coming soon and is not part of the current score. A Press workspace and campaign activity do not mean this audit area has been measured. Review the saved audit for its applied scope and weighting.

After the available checks finish, Outrigger uses the verified findings to prepare a prioritized action plan ranked by impact-to-effort ratio.

Each action item includes: - Priority number: Do #1 first, then #2, and so on - Pillar: Which pillar this action addresses (color-coded) - Specific action: Not vague advice. Concrete steps like "Seed 20 high-authority Reddit threads where competitors are mentioned but you are not" - Impact: High, medium, or low expected effect on your score - Effort: High, medium, or low work required - Timeline: How long this should take (e.g., "Week 1-2") - Module: Which Outrigger module prepares or tracks this action

The action plan is designed as a campaign roadmap. Work through it top to bottom and re-audit monthly to track progress. Quick wins (high impact, low effort) are prioritized at the top of the plan.

Typical action plan for a new client: 1. Seed high-authority citation threads (Citation Engine) 2. Fix entity inconsistencies (Entity Sync) 3. Launch targeted press campaign (Press) 4. Set up review request campaigns (Review Engine) 5. Optimize website schema for AI crawlers (Technical)

Every audit is stored as a snapshot. Running monthly audits gives you a trend line to track score movement over time.

What to look for in monthly comparisons: - Composite score trend: Is the overall number going up? Even 5-10 points per month is solid progress. - Pillar-by-pillar movement: Which pillars improved and which stalled? This tells you where to focus next month. - Citation gap closing: Are you appearing in more threads than last month? Is the competitor dominance ratio shrinking? - AI Presence gains: Are more AI models mentioning you? This is the lagging indicator; compare your AI Presence score at Days 30, 60, and 90 against your Day 0 baseline as AI models re-crawl threads where you have placed citations. - Action plan updates: Each audit generates a fresh action plan based on current data, so priorities shift as you make progress.

Reporting to clients: Open a saved monthly client report and choose Save as PDF to use your browser’s print dialog. The report contains headline metrics, AI platform bars, questions with and without brand mentions, and saved completed work and next focus when available. One About this report box explains the limits. Missing measurements are labelled rather than counted as zero; AI mention rates are not compared across months because questions and coverage can change.