When we say “AI visibility audit,” we mean something specific. Not a generic SEO report. Not a traffic analysis. A structured scoring of your business across 10 benchmarks that determine whether AI search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude — can find you, understand you, and recommend you.
Here’s exactly what we check and why each benchmark matters.
The 10 Benchmarks
1. AI Search Presence
We run your business name, your service category, and your location through every major AI engine and document what comes back. Do you appear in answers? Do competitors appear instead? What language does the AI use to describe your category?
This is the baseline — your current score before any improvements.
2. Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data that tells search engines (and AI engines) exactly what your business is. Without it, AI has to guess. With it, you’re explicitly declaring: “I am a plumbing company. I serve Milwaukee. I’ve been in business since 2011. My phone number is X.”
Most Milwaukee small business sites have zero schema. The ones that do often have it misconfigured. We audit type, completeness, and accuracy.
3. Crawlability
If AI can’t reach your site, it can’t index it. We check: Is your site indexable? Is robots.txt blocking anything important? Is your sitemap correct and submitted? Are there crawl errors? Do your canonical tags match your actual URLs?
A technically broken site can rank fine on Google (which has enormous crawl resources) but be completely skipped by AI engines with more limited reach.
4. Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
AI engines — especially Google’s — factor page experience into what they surface. A site that loads in 4 seconds on mobile is a liability. We measure LCP, INP, and CLS against current benchmarks and flag anything that’s dragging you down.
5. Local Citation Consistency
AI engines cross-reference your business across multiple sources. If your name is “Milwaukee HVAC Pros” on your website, “Milwaukee HVAC” on Yelp, and “Milwaukee Heating and Cooling Professionals” on Google Business Profile, those inconsistencies reduce AI confidence in your identity.
We audit your top 15 citation sources for NAP consistency.
6. Google Business Profile Completeness
Your GBP is still one of the most important AI signals for local businesses — it’s a structured data source that Google AI reads directly. We check: Is it claimed? Is it complete? Do you have photos, hours, services, and a description? Are reviews being responded to?
7. Review Signals
AI engines weight businesses that have public, verified reviews. Volume matters. Recency matters. Response rate matters. We look at your review presence across Google, Yelp, and industry-specific platforms (Houzz for contractors, Zillow for agents, etc.).
8. Content Depth and Topical Authority
A homepage with five bullet points does not establish expertise. AI engines favor businesses with content that demonstrates clear, specific knowledge: service pages with real detail, FAQ content that answers the questions buyers actually ask, neighborhood or service-area pages that signal geographic coverage.
We benchmark your content depth against the businesses that are showing up in AI results for your category.
9. AI Search Competitor Gap
We don’t just score you in isolation. We score your top 3–5 competitors on the same benchmarks and show you exactly where the gap is. Sometimes you’re one schema fix away from leapfrogging everyone. Sometimes there’s a 6-month content gap to close. Either way, you see the full picture.
10. Link and Citation Authority
AI engines still respect external signals of credibility. How many other sites mention your business? What’s your overall domain authority? Are you listed in relevant directories, association sites, or local press?
This is the hardest benchmark to move quickly, but knowing your baseline matters.
What Good Looks Like
A business scoring 8–10 on these benchmarks typically:
- Has complete, accurate LocalBusiness schema (or more specific types: RealEstateAgent, HomeAndConstructionBusiness, etc.)
- Loads in under 2 seconds on mobile
- Has a fully built-out GBP with 50+ reviews and active response cadence
- Has service pages with 800+ words of specific, useful content
- Has consistent NAP across 20+ directories
- Has some inbound links from local press, chamber sites, or industry associations
If you want to sanity-check two of the most important technical pieces yourself, review Schema.org for markup types and Google’s Core Web Vitals overview for the performance thresholds modern search systems use.
Most Milwaukee small businesses score 2–4 when we first audit them. That’s not a criticism — it’s a structural gap most owners didn’t know existed until AI search arrived.
If you have not read the broader primer yet, start with Is Your Milwaukee Business Invisible to ChatGPT?. If you work in real estate, pair this with Why Milwaukee Realtors Are Losing Clients to AI Search.
What the Report Looks Like
The audit delivers as a branded PDF in 48 hours. Inside:
- Your score on each benchmark (with evidence, not just a grade)
- A prioritized fix list sorted by impact-to-effort ratio
- Three quick wins you can act on before you hire anyone
- A plain-English explanation of what each fix does and why it matters
The $499 version delivers the report. The $999 version includes a 60-minute strategy call with Bryant where we walk through it together and build a 90-day action plan.