An AI visibility audit answers one question with evidence: when your buyers ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews or Perplexity who to use, do you appear, who appears instead, and what would change the answer? A proper one delivers a prompt set built from real buyer questions, screenshots of the answers as they stand, a competitor comparison, a technical access check, and a fix roadmap in priority order.
Next step: see what the audit includes and costs, or request the free five-prompt snapshot.
That is the whole product. The rest of this article unpacks each deliverable, gives honest UK price ranges, and lists the questions that separate a real audit from a PDF with your logo on it.
Why audit AI visibility at all?
Because a growing share of shortlists now starts inside an AI answer rather than a page of blue links.
When a buyer asks "who can service this equipment in the UK" and the assistant names three firms, those three get the enquiry and nobody else knows the question was asked.
Most specialist firms have never once looked at what these systems say about them.
The audit replaces that blind spot with screenshots, which is why it comes first: why firms don't show up in AI answers has six different causes, and guessing which one applies to you wastes months.
The five deliverables to expect
1. A prompt set built from buyer questions
The audit starts by working out what your buyers actually ask: not your brand name, but the problem questions.
"Best UPS maintenance provider UK." "Who can rewind a 400kW motor." "Obsolete drive repair." A defensible audit tests a fixed set of these, five in our method, across the assistants your market uses, and shows you the list so you can challenge it.
If the prompts are generic, everything downstream is decoration.
2. The answers, screenshotted
Every prompt gets run and captured: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Copilot where it matters for your market. The screenshots are the point.
They are dated evidence of the starting position, they make the problem impossible to argue with, and they are the baseline the follow-up work gets measured against.
3. Competitor share of voice
Who gets named, how often, and in what tone. Usually the pattern surprises people: the firms an MD considers rivals are often absent too, while a distributor, a directory or an American giant soaks up the mentions.
Knowing who actually owns the answers tells you what you are up against and how hard the gap is to close.
4. The technical access check
Whether AI crawlers can read your site at all: robots.txt rules, JavaScript-only content that assistants never see, missing Organization and Service schema, entity confusion across your profiles.
These are unglamorous findings and they are the fastest wins on the list, because a site that machines cannot read loses every answer by default. The mechanics of what gets a page quoted are covered in how businesses get cited by ChatGPT.
5. The fix roadmap
Findings ordered by expected effect on enquiries, not by how impressive they sound.
A good roadmap says: fix this first, it unblocks everything; write these three pages next, they target questions nobody answers; leave that alone, it will not move anything. You should be able to hand it to any competent implementer, including your own team.
What it should cost in the UK
Published pricing is mostly American and it spreads wide: automated or template audits from $99 to $1,500, small-business engagements from $500 to $5,000, and five-figure enterprise work. Very few UK firms publish a price at all.
As a working rule, a manual audit of a specialist UK business, done by a person who reads your market, should land between £800 and £2,500.
Below that range you are usually buying a tool export; above it you are usually paying for an agency's overheads.
For reference, the audit inside our AI Search Visibility Programme is a fixed fee, published on the audit page, credited against the first month if you continue into the monthly work, and takes ten working days.
It exists so the decision to spend more is based on evidence rather than a pitch.
Questions that expose a weak audit
Ask to see the prompt set before you sign: if they cannot show one, they have not thought about your buyers. Ask whether the deliverable includes dated screenshots.
Ask who your top three AI-cited competitors are; a firm that has done real audits can describe the pattern they usually find.
Ask what happens if the audit finds nothing wrong. And ask whether the roadmap is implementable without them: if the answer is no, it is a sales document.
The free way to start
You do not need to spend anything to find out whether you have a problem. We run a free 5-prompt AI visibility snapshot: five buyer questions, run and screenshotted, with two lines on each about what we would change.
It is the first fifth of the audit, and it is usually enough to tell you whether the rest is worth the fixed fee.
Quick answers
- How much does an AI visibility audit cost in the UK?
- Published prices are mostly American: roughly $99 to $1,500 for automated or template audits, $500 to $5,000 for small-business work, and five figures at enterprise scale. In the UK expect a serious manual audit of a specialist firm to sit between £800 and £2,500. KS Media's audit is a fixed fee, published on the audit page, credited against the first month if you continue into the monthly programme.
- What should an AI visibility audit actually deliver?
- Five things: a prompt set built from real buyer questions, screenshots of what ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity answer today, a competitor share-of-voice comparison, a technical check covering AI crawler access and schema, and a prioritised fix roadmap. If a quote does not include the evidence screenshots and the roadmap, it is a report, not an audit.
- Can I run an AI visibility audit myself?
- A basic version, yes: ask ChatGPT and Google the five questions your buyers ask, in a private window, and note who gets named. That tells you whether you have a problem. The paid audit earns its fee in the parts that are harder to do alone: a defensible prompt set, competitor benchmarking, the crawler and schema diagnosis, and knowing which fix moves the answer first.
- How long does an audit take, and what happens afterwards?
- Ours runs across ten working days. Afterwards you own the findings either way: some firms fix things in-house, some continue into a monthly programme where the fixes get implemented and re-measured. A good auditor is relaxed about which path you pick, because the audit stands on its own.
See where you stand today
We ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers the five questions your buyers ask, screenshot who gets named, and send you the results. Free, by hand, and no call required. If the answer is "not named", the fixed-fee audit says why.