How to Run a 12-Surface AI Visibility Audit on Any B2B Brand
AI-generated answers now influence B2B buying decisions at the top of the funnel. Buyers use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini to shortlist vendors before they ever visit a website. Which means the question "where does my brand actually appear in AI-generated answers?" is now a critical GTM intelligence question. Most brands don't know the answer. This post gives you the methodology to find out. What an AI visibility audit is — and isn't An AI visibility audit is not a technical SEO audit. You're not looking for broken links, page speed issues, or crawl errors (though those matter for a related reason). You're auditing citation density — how frequently and authoritatively your brand appears across the specific sources that LLMs draw from when generating recommendations. Those sources break down into 12 distinct surfaces. A brand can score 9/10 on one surface and 1/10 on eleven others — and the aggregate result is a brand that appears for some queries and not others in ways that seem inexplicable but are structurally predictable. The goal of this audit is to make that structure visible. The 12 surfaces — quick reference Before diving into the methodology, here's the full surface map: # Surface Primary platforms 1 AI Interfaces ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot 2 Search + AI Search Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Perplexity Search 3 Reviews + Reputation G2, Clutch, Capterra, industry-specific platforms 4 Earned Media + Publishers Trade press, business press, analyst reports 5 Owned Content + Website Brand site, blog, schema markup, answer-object pages 6 Technical + Developer GitHub, dev.to, Stack Overflow, Hacker News 7 Social + Authority LinkedIn, executive publishing, award citations 8 Data + Knowledge Graphs Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, ZoomInfo 9 Marketplaces + Ecosystems Clutch category pages, Agency Spotter, partner directories 10 Case Studies + Proof Published case studies, award wins, client outcomes 11 Community + Q&A Reddit, Quora, Lin