What an AI visibility audit should actually include (and what it should cost)

"AI visibility audit" is becoming a product category faster than buyers can define it. Quotes range from under a hundred dollars to four figures, often for a deliverable that is broadly the same work. Here is what a real audit measures, how to spot a hollow one, and what things actually cost — with published prices we checked ourselves.

The five things a real audit measures

1. Unprompted recall across engines. These are questions a buyer would ask without your name in them, and a real audit puts them to more than one assistant, because being named to someone comparing options is worth more than being named to someone still reading, and different engines give different answers. If the audit only asks one assistant, or asks questions that already contain your name, it is measuring nothing but a search box.

2. A fact-check against your own site. Assistants get details wrong: wrong services, wrong prices — or they fail to confirm the business exists at all. In one measurement, 14 of the 333 facts the assistants stated about the business were wrong, including answers that said plainly they could not identify its location, services or prices. A real audit checks every checkable claim against your own pages and shows you the table.

3. Who is recommended instead of you, and why. Not a top-five list — every business the assistants named, ranked, with the reason quoted from the answer itself. This is the part you take to a marketing meeting: "the assistant recommends them because of their review profile" is actionable; "you scored 61" is not.

4. Technical crawlability. Whether the AI systems can even read your site: structured data that parses, pages that render without JavaScript, no stray noindex. This is the cheapest layer to fix and the first thing an honest audit checks.

5. Where the answers come from. The sites an assistant actually opened while answering questions about your market. If those sites do not mention you, your work is there, not on your homepage.

Three red flags of a hollow audit

• A score with no raw evidence. If you cannot read the full text of every answer the score was computed from, you are being asked to trust a number. The entire value of a measurement is that it can be checked; our sample report prints all of it for exactly this reason.
• Invented volume numbers. "People ask AI X thousand times a month about your category" — nobody can know this, and a vendor selling it is telling you how they treat other numbers.
• No repeated questions. Assistants drift between runs. An audit that asks each question once cannot tell a finding from a fluke, and cannot tell you whether anything changed after you fix it.

What this market actually charges

Published prices, checked at the date below:

The hundredfold spread at the top of the table, for a broadly similar deliverable, is the single most useful fact on this page. Prices this dispersed mean the market has no settled notion of what the work costs, so every quote is negotiable and every vendor should be asked what exactly is included.

Ours is $4.99 once. The full method is published, and the free check shows you all 30 questions we'd ask, in full, before you decide anything.