The Shelf / Growth / AI Visibility Audit
AI Visibility Audit
Find out if AI assistants name you when buyers ask. Every answer logged, nothing guessed.
The job: find out whether an AI assistant names you when a buyer asks it instead of typing into Google. "Best tool for [who]." "[You] vs [competitor]." "Is [you] any good?" More of those buyers never reach a results page at all. The assistant writes one answer, names a few brands, links one of them, and everybody else is invisible. This audit shows exactly where you land with each assistant, and shows its work.
Why the obvious approaches fail. Guessing gets you nothing — nobody can eyeball what every assistant is saying about them. Normal SEO tools cannot see this at all; they watch links on a results page, not the names inside a written answer, and building more pages is a different job. And asking ChatGPT once yourself is the easiest trap to fall into: the answer changes each time you ask. One ask is a roll of the dice dressed up as a finding.
What's on the tag:
- A locked set of buyer questions in four kinds — "best tool for X", "how do I fix X", "you vs them", and "is X any good" — asked several times per assistant, so every number is how often you showed up, not one lucky screenshot.
- The assistants that matter: OpenAI, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude run on their own using your account keys. The ones with no door in — Google's AI answers, AI Mode, Copilot, and the ChatGPT people actually use — you paste in by hand, or a paid service pulls them for you. Each is labeled with how it was checked — nothing is skipped quietly or scored a zero.
- A scorecard that keeps NAMED and LINKED apart (named with no link means no click), how much of the answer is you and how much is the rivals you named, the tone with the exact sentence quoted, and the other people's pages the assistants keep quoting.
- A grade on your own pages, scored only from what is actually on them, plus a do-this-next list split between "fix your page" and "get onto the page the assistants already quote."
Why not a free prompt? A free prompt gives you one ask, one assistant, and a number nobody wrote down. This asks many, across assistants, and every figure points back to the question asked, the answer returned, and the time. It never invents a score, and it says plainly which assistants were reached directly and which are standing in for the consumer version. Because the questions and the settings are locked, you run the whole thing again next month and get a list of what moved. That is what turns a one-off into a monthly job.
Runs on the assistant keys you already have. Nothing invented — the report says only what the questions actually returned.
FIELD REPORT real output, not a promise
From a documented run of this workflow: a GEO (AI-answer) visibility audit for Tasklet — a fictional project-management SaaS — across three AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview) in assisted-capture mode, against a frozen competitor set (Asana, Trello, Notion, ClickUp), at pilot scale (3 prompts, 2 of 4 intent families, N=1). Excerpted and trimmed to the strongest honest portions of the captured deliverable; the three real out-of-set vendors that surfaced unprompted are anonymized as [Competitor E/F/G].
Report header — provenance + standing caveats
- Brand: Tasklet (tasklet.io) | Named competitors: Asana, Trello, Notion, ClickUp
- Engines this run: ChatGPT — ASSISTED-CAPTURE (manual paste); Perplexity — ASSISTED-CAPTURE (manual paste — no API call happened this run, so it's labeled by actual provenance, not its usual AUTOMATED bucket); Google AI Overview — ASSISTED-CAPTURE (native). Gemini, Claude, Microsoft Copilot — NOT CAPTURED this run (no key, no paste supplied).
- Standing caveats: (1) no engine was queried via API this run — "model-grounded (API proxy)" labeling doesn't apply; all captures are manual pastes of consumer answers. (2) Every cell is N=1, well under the skill's 3-run minimum — every rate below is a single snapshot, not a validated frequency. (3) Only 3 prompts across 2 of 4 required intent families (category, comparison) — problem-first and brand-defense untested. This is a pilot/demo-scale sample, not a production audit.
Visibility scorecard — per-response log
| # | Prompt (family) | Engine | Mentioned? | Cited (linked)? | Competitors named | Sentiment (exact sentence) | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A – best PM app (category) | ChatGPT | No | No | Asana, Trello, Notion, ClickUp | — | — |
| 2 | A | Perplexity | Yes | Yes (tasklet.io) | Asana, Trello, ClickUp | Positive, secondary — "Some smaller teams also like Tasklet [tasklet.io] for its lightweight setup." | 4th-named / "also like" framing |
| 3 | A | Google AI Overview | No | No | Asana, [Competitor E], Trello, Notion | — | — |
| 4 | B – Tasklet vs Asana (comparison) | ChatGPT | Yes | No | Asana | Positive — "Tasklet is a lighter, cheaper tool aimed at small teams... For 5 people, Tasklet may be enough; Asana scales further." | First-named |
| 5 | B | Perplexity | Yes | Yes (tasklet.io) | Asana | Positive — "Tasklet [tasklet.io] targets small teams with a simpler UI and lower price; Asana [asana.com] is more powerful but heavier." | First-named |
| 6 | C – affordable Asana alternatives | ChatGPT | No | No | Trello, ClickUp, Notion, [Competitor F] | — | — |
| 7 | C | Google AI Overview | No | No | Trello, ClickUp, [Competitor G], Notion | — | — |
Bracketed competitors ([Competitor E/F/G] — three real PM tools, anonymized here) surfaced unprompted and are outside the frozen named set. Not captured: Perplexity on Prompt C; Gemini/Claude/Copilot on all prompts.
Aggregate rates (single-capture — read as a snapshot, not a frequency)
| Engine | Mode | Captured | Mention rate | Citation rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | ASSISTED (manual paste) | 3/3 | 1/3 (33%) | 0/3 (0%) |
| Perplexity | ASSISTED (manual paste) | 2/3 | 2/2 (100%) | 2/2 (100%) |
| Google AI Overview | ASSISTED (native) | 2/3 | 0/2 (0%) | 0/2 (0%) |
| Gemini / Claude / Copilot | — | NOT CAPTURED | — | — |
Blended (7 responses): mentioned 3/7 (43%), cited 2/7 (29%) — a single-capture cross-engine snapshot, not a repeated-run frequency; do not treat as a trend point.
Share-of-voice (brand ÷ brand + named-competitor mentions, per prompt)
| Prompt | Tasklet | Asana | Trello | Notion | ClickUp | Tasklet SoV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1/11 ≈ 9% |
| B | 2 | 2 | – | – | – | 2/4 = 50% |
| C | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0/6 = 0% |
| Blended | 3 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | 3/21 ≈ 14% |
Competitor-dominance flags (≥60% competitor, ≤20% brand, same prompt)
- Prompt C — Trello/ClickUp/Notion each 100% (2/2); Tasklet 0%. Flag clears cleanly.
- Prompt A — Asana/Trello each 100% (3/3); Tasklet 33% (1/3) — just above the literal ≤20% bar, and that one appearance is a secondary "also like" mention. Directionally identical pattern, flagged as near-dominance rather than overstating a hard flag.
Sentiment + citation honesty
Positive: 3 (Perplexity ×2, ChatGPT ×1). Neutral/Negative: 0. No hallucinated or negative claims surfaced — but the brand-defense family (the one built to catch that) wasn't run this cycle, so this is absence-of-signal, not evidence of a clean bill of health. Only Perplexity returned links (all brand-owned: asana.com, trello.com, clickup.com, tasklet.io — no third-party listicle/review-site citations). ChatGPT and Google AI Overview show zero links for anyone — could be real product behavior or a lossy paste, so their 0% citation reading is flagged unconfirmed until the next capture explicitly checks for citation chips.
Citability grade — DEFERRED, not run
Tasklet has no live URL in this sample. Step 5 requires fetching and grading only what's on the actual page — a score here would be invented, which the skill explicitly forbids. No grade given. What the scorecard already implies without grading the page: Prompt B's ChatGPT response is a textbook "mentioned but not linked" case (favorable, zero citation) — sourced-stats/FAQ fixes are the standard first move for that pattern, to be confirmed against the real page once a URL is supplied.
Conversational summary
Headline: Tasklet is essentially invisible on both discovery-stage prompts (9% and 0% SoV, both near/clear dominance flags) and only competitive on its own-brand "vs Asana" comparison (50% SoV) — "the model only knows you when you name yourself," plus one classic "known but not linked" case (ChatGPT, Prompt B). Top 3 actions: go after the broad "best PM app" / "alternatives" prompts where competitors sweep 100%; build out Trello/ClickUp/Notion comparison pages to match the working Asana page; re-capture ChatGPT/Google AI Overview with explicit citation-chip logging. Open questions: add Gemini/Claude/Copilot next run? add the recurring out-of-set tool ([Competitor E]) to the named cohort? can we get a live tasklet.io URL to run the deferred citability grade?
SERVICE RECORD living gear — updated as the factory learns
v1.0.1 — 2026-08-25
Two vendor-doc corrections, both verified 2026-08-25. Perplexity Sonar pricing: the package claimed retrieval was folded into the per-token price with no separate search fee — Sonar now bills a flat per-request search fee ($5–$14 per 1,000 requests, tiered by search context size; deep-research bills search queries separately at $5 per 1,000) on top of tokens, and on short brand-audit prompts that fee is the dominant cost. The cost-estimate guidance now counts it first. Gemini citations: the field spec documented only the groundingMetadata shape — that now lives on the legacy Generate Content API, while the current API returns inline url_citation annotations plus google_search_call/google_search_result blocks. Both shapes are now documented and labeled so a parser matches whichever surface it calls; also noted that Gemini 3 models bill per executed search query, not per grounded prompt.
v1.0.0 — 2026-07-17
First issue. Ported from the factory's internal skill: sanitized for general use, methodology intact, field report captured from a real run.
Every update ships free to owners — your locker always serves the latest version.
QUESTIONS
Isn't this just an SEO audit?›
No. Normal SEO fights for a link on Google's results page. This checks whether you get named and linked inside the answer the AI writes — somewhere normal SEO tools cannot see, and a different job from building SEO pages. Plenty of what helps here is plain good-website work. What you are buying is the measuring and the order to fix things in, not a secret lever.
Do I need my own AI accounts to run it?›
You need at least one key. A key is a password that lets a program use your OpenAI, Perplexity, Gemini or Anthropic account. More keys, more assistants covered. Google's AI answers, AI Mode and Copilot have no key at all — either you paste their answers in by hand, or a paid service (SerpApi or DataForSEO) grabs them for you. Anything you cannot reach is reported 'not captured', never faked. If you only get one key, make it Perplexity. Of the ones with a key, it is the closest stand-in for what a real person is shown.
Can it make the numbers look better than they are?›
No, by design. Every figure points back to a question that was asked, the answer that came back, and when. An assistant it could not reach is marked 'not captured this run', not scored a zero. And one run is treated as noise — how often you show up is counted over several runs, with the spread shown.
Why not just ask ChatGPT the question myself once?›
Because one ask is one roll of the dice. The same question hands back different brands and different links the next time. This asks a fixed set of questions several times across several assistants, counts being named apart from being linked, and gives you something you can run again and compare. One manual ask cannot do that.