Free AI visibility check: how to do one that actually tells you something

A free AI visibility check should answer one question: when a buyer asks an assistant about the service you sell, does your business come up? Most "free checks" on the market answer a different one: "can we get you on a sales call." Here is what a real one looks like, so you can tell the difference.

What a real check consists of

Three things separate a check from a vibe:

1. Buyer questions, not brand searches. Asking "tell me about [your business name]" measures whether the assistant has heard of you — that is the easy half. The questions that decide revenue are the unbranded ones a buyer asks before they know you exist: the need ("who does natural-looking Botox in Nashville"), the comparison, the price. A real check asks those.
2. More than one engine. ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode each pull from different sources and refresh on different schedules. Being visible in one and absent in three is a common, actionable result — invisible everywhere is a different problem with a different fix. A check that only queries one assistant cannot tell you which situation you are in.
3. Fresh sessions. Assistants remember your conversation. Ask about your own business in a chat window you have used before, and you are measuring your own history, not the assistant. Every question in a real check starts from a clean session.

The three ways to get one

By hand. Write down 15–20 buyer questions across the buying journey, ask each in a fresh chat on each assistant, and record: mentioned or not, who else was named, whether the details were right. It costs an evening. Its limits: your sample is small, your chat history can bias it, and the tedium means most businesses do it once and never again.

An agency's "free audit." Read what the offer actually contains. The pattern to watch for is the vague-urgent email, now common enough that regulators and industry press have flagged it: "we found issues with how AI sees your website, reply to fix." A real check shows you the exact questions asked and the exact answers that came back, before any money moves. If the findings cannot be shown, they do not exist.

An automated pre-check. Ours is on this site: you give a domain, it reads the site, and it shows you how the measurement works — all 30 questions in full, including a head-to-head against a rival you name. The free part is deliberately the part that lets you judge whether the paid part is worth it. No account, no card.

What free cannot tell you

Honest boundary: a free check tells you what to ask, not where you stand. The standing is the measurement: 30 buyer questions across five AI surfaces, fresh sessions, every answer graded and cited. That is the $4.99 part. In the published sample (a med spa, measured fresh this month), the business was named in 22 of the 75 unbranded asks (25 questions, each put to three engines), while 167 other businesses appeared alongside it. No amount of hand-checking a few chats would have surfaced that gap, because the interesting number is how many other businesses the assistants reached for first.

Run yours

The free check takes about two minutes and ends with the questions, in writing, before anything is asked of you. If you want to see what a full measurement looks like first, the sample report and the method page are both published in full.