Quick AI Visibility Check: A 30-Minute Checklist

This is the quick version. In half an hour, with two AI assistants and a spreadsheet, you can see whether you are named, where in a buying conversation you drop out, and which rival takes your place. It will not tell you why. For the causes, such as blocked crawlers, weak pages or missing reviews, run the full AI visibility audit, which takes about a day.

Use this checklist when you need a first read before a meeting, or as a monthly pulse check between full audits.

Set up (5 minutes)

1. Pick two assistants. ChatGPT plus one of Gemini or Perplexity gives a useful spread; assistants lean on different sources, as how Perplexity chooses sources shows.
2. Use a fresh chat, signed out or in a private window where you can. Memory and history can tilt answers towards what you have looked at before.
3. Open a sheet with these columns: prompt, assistant, named (yes or no), position, rivals named, what was said, sources cited.
4. Write down your two main rivals first. Deciding before you see the answers keeps the comparison honest.

Run the conversation (15 minutes)

Ask these in order, in the same chat, the way a buyer would. Most map to a stage of a Thread.

5. Discovery: "What are the best options for [your category] for [your typical buyer]?"
6. Shortlist: "Which of those would suit [a real condition your buyers have]?"
7. Shortlist, head to head: "How does [your brand] compare with [your main rival]?"
8. Objection: "What are the downsides of [your brand]?"
9. Trust: "Is [your brand] reliable? What do customers say about the service?"
10. Value: "Is [your brand] worth the price compared with the alternatives?"
11. Decision: "Which one would you buy, and where?"
12. Repeat in the second assistant. Differences between the two are a finding in themselves.

The buyer conversation prompts have more wording for each stage if these do not fit your category.

Read the results (5 minutes)

13. Mark each answer: named and accurate, named with errors, or not named.
14. Find the stage where you stop being named. That stage decides what to fix. Why your brand disappears in follow-up questions explains the middle stages.
15. List every rival named where you were not. Each is a gap with a name on it.
16. Note every wrong fact. A wrong price or a discontinued product means something in the public record disagrees with you.
17. Note the sources cited. Those are the pages shaping the answer about you right now.

Decide the first fix (5 minutes)

18. Fix wrong facts first. Correct the page the assistant relied on, or ask its owner to; a wrong fact can come back in every later answer.
19. Then work on the earliest stage where you drop out. Losing at Discovery means you are missing from the coverage assistants read; losing at Trust means thin proof. Fixes further down the conversation do not help until you survive the earlier stages.
20. Check that crawlers can reach your key pages. The free AI crawler checker takes a minute. A page an assistant cannot read cannot be cited.
21. Book the next check. Same prompts, same assistants, next month. Answers vary from run to run, so one result is a snapshot; a pattern over several checks is a finding.

When 30 minutes is not enough

A manual check samples one answer per question on one day. Assistants rarely answer the same way twice, which is why Vouch runs each Thread three times a week on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and tracks your prompts every day across seven assistants. It shows the stage where you drop out, who replaces you and the sources cited, and the methodology explains how the weekly Vouch Rate is scored. How to track brand mentions in AI search covers keeping a manual log going in the meantime.

Vouch is invite-only at present: join the waitlist, and each invitation comes with a 14-day free trial.