The 20 Minute AI Visibility Audit You Can Run Yourself

August 22, 2026

Run these seven checks in order. Each one rules out a whole category of problem, and every one tells you exactly what a passing result looks like so you are not left guessing.

By Margareta Petrovic, founder of Visibility Mesh. We measure how legible ecommerce stores are to AI, and publish what we find. Updated August 2026.

Key takeaways

Do them in order. A failure early makes everything after it irrelevant.
Each check states its pass condition, so there is no interpretation required.
Total time is about twenty minutes for a small store.

Check 1: can crawlers reach you?

Type your domain followed by /robots.txt into your browser. Read the file top to bottom looking for lines that begin with Disallow under a User-agent you care about.

Pass: no rule blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended or Bingbot from the paths that matter. Fail: any of those named with Disallow, or a blanket Disallow slash under User-agent star.

Check 2: does your content exist without JavaScript?

Open a product page. Right click and choose View Page Source, which shows the HTML as delivered rather than as rendered. Press Ctrl and F, then paste in a sentence you can see on the page.

Pass: the sentence is found. Fail: it is not, which means your copy is drawn by scripts and some assistants will never see it.

Check 3: are you actually indexed?

Copy a distinctive full sentence from one of your pages. Paste it into Google inside double quotation marks.

Pass: your page comes back. Fail: nothing comes back, which means the page is not indexed and nothing downstream can work.

Check 4: is your product data machine readable?

Open a product page and view the source again. Search for application/ld+json. Read the block it finds.

Pass: a Product type with a name, an offers block containing price and priceCurrency, and an availability value, and all of it matches what the page displays. Fail: no block, or a price in the markup that differs from the price on the page.

Check 5: does the assistant know who you are?

Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask: what is [your brand name], and what do they sell? Use your brand exactly as it appears on your site.

Pass: a description you would recognise as your business. Fail: a confident description of somebody else, or nothing. Both mean your identity is not corroborated where it can be checked.

Check 6: would it recommend you?

Ask the buying question a customer would ask, without naming your brand. Something like: what are the best places to buy [your category] online?

Pass: you are named. Fail: you are not, and the stores that are named are your real competitive set. Write them down.

Check 7: is your price and stock current?

Compare the price and availability in the structured data from check 4 against what a shopper sees today, on a product whose price has changed recently.

Pass: they match. Fail: they differ, which is worse than having no markup at all, because it produces a recommendation that fails at the moment of purchase.

What do I do with the results?

Fix in the order the checks are numbered. A failure at check 1 makes checks 4 through 7 unreachable, so there is no value in fixing structured data on a site nothing can crawl.

If you would rather not do this by hand across every page, our free scan runs the same logic across the whole site and ranks what it finds. The shorter version of this list covers the same ground in six checks.

Common questions

Do I need any tools for this?
No. A browser and an assistant account are enough. Every check above uses View Page Source or a question typed into a chat window.

How often should I repeat it?
Monthly, and always after a theme change, an app install or a migration. Those are the moments when crawl access quietly breaks.

What if everything passes but I am still not recommended?
Then readability is not your constraint, corroboration is. Being readable makes you eligible. Being mentioned elsewhere is what gets you chosen.