How often should I run an AI-visibility audit?

Monthly is the right cadence for your core 30-prompt set across your top three platforms. Run a deeper quarterly audit that expands prompts, adds platforms, and does a competitive gap review. Ad-hoc checks make sense after major content launches or any time you see a sudden change in AI referral traffic in your analytics.

What platforms should I include in a baseline audit?

Start with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, these three together cover the majority of commercial AI search volume in 2026. Add Gemini and Claude in your quarterly deep audit. Platform behavior diverges enough that optimizing only for Google while ignoring Perplexity, or vice versa, leaves real gaps: only 11% of domains cited by ChatGPT overlap with Perplexity citations.

How many prompts do I need to get statistically meaningful results?

30 prompts across three platforms (90 data points per month) gives you enough signal to detect meaningful trends. Fewer than 20 prompts and your mention-rate percentage becomes too volatile, a single response change swings your score by 5+ points. More than 50 prompts is valuable but raises execution cost; use tooling if you go above that threshold.

My brand has a zero percent mention rate. Where do I start?

Focus on earned media first. Distributing your content to reputable third-party publications consistently increases AI citations, earned placements on high-authority domains carry substantially more weight than publishing on your own domain alone. Identify the two or three publications that consistently appear in AI responses for your category, and earn placements there. Then structure your own site's most important pages with clear headers, definition blocks, and attributed statistics.

How is AI share of voice different from traditional search share of voice?

Traditional SoV counts ranking positions and estimated impressions. AI SoV counts how often your brand is named across a defined prompt set relative to named competitors. The key difference: in traditional search you can rank #1 without a competitor being mentioned; in AI search, a response that mentions four competitors and not you is a zero for your brand regardless of your organic rankings.

Can I trust AI responses to be consistent from one run to the next?

No, AI engines are probabilistic. The same prompt can return different responses on two consecutive runs. That is why you run each prompt once per month rather than comparing hourly or daily. Monthly averages smooth the stochasticity enough to reveal real trends. If you want higher confidence, run each prompt three times per session and score the majority result.

How to Run a Monthly AI-Visibility Audit (Free Prompt List + Template)