Audit what AI answers say about your organisation

Step 1: Check that your site is included in Search generative AI features

Open the Search generative AI control in Search Console and record whether your site is set to include, exclude or inherit from parent.

By the last station you'll have a written record of what each engine reports about your site and what each one lets through. Four properties hold all of it: Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, your own robots.txt and your analytics. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity publish the numbers and the controls for their own surfaces, so nothing in this audit needs a third-party score.

This worksheet measures what the engines report about your site now. For the other half, earning a citation in the first place, read What answer engines publish about getting your pages cited.

Start with eligibility. Google's AI features optimization guide of 10 July 2026 sets four conditions for a page to be eligible for display in generative AI features:

1. Indexed the page is indexed.
2. Snippet-eligible the page is eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.
3. Technical requirements the page meets Search technical requirements.
4. Site-level inclusion the site is included in Search generative AI features in Search Console.

Read that last condition as a setting. The Search generative AI control offers three published choices: include your site's links and content in Search generative AI features, exclude them, or inherit control from parent. Google says excluding keeps your links and content out of those features and out of grounding responses there, without affecting ranking or inclusion in other parts of Search. Record which of the three your property is set to before you read a single number.

Step 2: Read your AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions in Search Console

Export the Pages dimension for the last three months and mark which of your pages Google has shown.

Open the Search generative AI performance report and read what it measures before you write the number down. It covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google defines the impressions in it as how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search. Break that down by Pages, Countries, Dates and Devices. Exact prompts aren't in the report, so leave that gap open in the audit instead of guessing at it.

The Google-side number. Google's AI features optimization guide states that no third-party tool has access to Google's internal ranking or AI systems. A vendor selling you an AI visibility score is working without that access. Record what Search Console reports and leave the vendor's number out.

Step 3: Count your citations and read your grounding queries in Bing

Note your three highest-share grounding queries and the page cited for each.

Bing publishes detail Google does not. Open the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools and put Microsoft's wording for each of its three measures next to your own figures.

1. Total Citations the number of times your content was visibly referenced or shown as a source in AI-generated answers during the selected date range.
2. Citation Share the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown for a specific grounding query.
3. Grounding Queries the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers. Microsoft cautions that these are grouped representations rather than exact user prompts or full questions, so read them as themes rather than sentences a supporter typed.

Not a traffic number. Microsoft says AI Performance does not measure rankings, authority, traffic, clicks or user engagement. Label the citation count that way, so nobody reads it back to the board as visits.

Step 4: Check which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets through

List every AI user agent your robots.txt names and what blocking each one costs you.

Open your own robots.txt and read it line by line against what the operators publish. Both OpenAI and Perplexity run separate user agents for separate jobs, and that split decides what a single Disallow line costs you.

• OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT search features. OpenAI says sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.
• GPTBot crawls content that may be used in training OpenAI's generative AI foundation models.
• PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity search results.
• Perplexity-User supports a user's own request. Perplexity says it is not used for web crawling or training, and that it generally ignores robots.txt because the fetch is user-requested.

The line most often wrong. A blanket block on every AI user agent takes out the search-facing bots along with the training crawlers. Record the search decision and the training decision separately, because your director is asking about the first one.

Step 5: Find ChatGPT referrals in your analytics

Filter your last 90 days of sessions on utm_source=chatgpt.com and record the landing pages.

OpenAI's publishers FAQ says ChatGPT automatically includes utm_source=chatgpt.com in referral URLs, so sites that allow OAI-SearchBot can track referral traffic from ChatGPT. The filter takes a minute inside the analytics property you already run. These sessions count visits rather than citations, and how many you see depends on how station four came out.

Step 6: Read three AI answers about your organisation against the pages they cite

Log each answer, the page it cited, and the one sentence on that page you would change.

No report does this station for you. OpenAI says ChatGPT search may rewrite the user's prompt into one or more targeted queries, and that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect. Read each answer against the page it cites rather than assuming it reflects that page.

1. Ask three real questions write down three questions a supporter would type about your organisation, in their words rather than yours, and ask each one.
2. Open every cited page follow each citation to the page on your own site and read what that page says on the point the answer made.
3. Log the gap note the fact the answer got wrong or left out, and the page that should have carried it.

Two columns hold that log. A stale service area or an old contact route is one sentence on your site you can change this week.

Step 7: Set the check you repeat next month

Diary the same four checks for the same week next month.

One pass tells you where you stand. The same pass a month later tells you what moved. Re-read four things in the same week each month:

• the Search generative AI control setting, and whether it still reads include, exclude or inherit from parent.
• your Total Citations, Citation Share and grounding-query list in Bing Webmaster Tools.
• the robots.txt lines naming OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User.
• the count of sessions carrying utm_source=chatgpt.com, and the pages they landed on.

Calibrate the report before you hand it to the director. Pew Research Center's analysis of Google searches found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% of visits when no AI summary appeared, and clicked a link inside the AI summary in 1% of visits.

Report the audit as a record rather than a forecast. The part worth working on sits in your log: what the answers state about your organisation, and the pages they cite for it.

What you can hand to the director

One page, every figure traceable to a property you administer: a setting, an impression count, a citation count with its grounding queries, four robots.txt decisions, a referral count, three answers read against the pages they cite, and a date next month to do it again. No vendor's score in it, and nothing claimed beyond what the engines publish.

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