The AI Visibility Audit Checklist: 25 Checks Every Singapore Brand Should Run

Quick answer: An AI visibility audit checks whether ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews can find, understand, trust and name your brand. Run it in five layers, in this order: presence (are you named?), crawl and index (can engines reach you?), entity (do they know who you are?), content (is it extractable?) and authority (do third parties vouch for you?). A first pass takes about one working day; AI Studio runs the same sequence in its free audit.

What does an AI visibility audit cover, and how long does it take?

An AI visibility audit is a structured check of whether AI assistants can retrieve your pages, attribute them to your brand, and choose to cite you when a buyer asks a question. Each check is a pass or fail, and the order matters: a failed crawl check makes every content check irrelevant.

Budget one working day: two hours reading answers by hand, an afternoon on the technical, entity and content sections with free tools, and an hour of searching for authority. Record everything in one sheet. Use an incognito session so personalisation does not colour answers, ask every engine the same questions in the same words, and note the date.

Section A: Presence checks — is your brand named at all?

Presence checks show the outcome before you look for causes. Pick the three questions a buyer asks just before shortlisting suppliers, such as "best corporate video production company in Singapore", and run each through ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini and Google with AI Overviews.

1. Check 1 — Named or not. For each engine and question, is your brand named anywhere? Pass: named in at least one engine per question.
2. Check 2 — Who is named instead. List every brand the engine names. This is your real AI-search competitor set, often different from your SEO competitors.
3. Check 3 — Citation sources. Expand the sources and note the domain types: your site, directory, listicle, review site, press. Pass: you know which source types dominate your category.
4. Check 4 — Position and framing. When named, are you first or last, and how are you described? Engines often copy one source verbatim. Pass: the description is accurate and current.
5. Check 5 — Brand query. Ask "what does [your brand] do and where is it based?" Pass: correct on service, location and one differentiator. A hedged answer is an entity problem (Section C).

To repeat this monthly, see our guide on how to track AI citations.

Section B: Crawl and index checks — can AI engines reach your pages?

If a crawler cannot fetch a page, nothing else you do to it counts. This is where we see the most expensive silent failures, usually left over from a migration.

1. Check 6 — robots.txt allowlist. Confirm you are not disallowing the retrieval crawlers that feed citations: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, Bingbot and Googlebot. Blocking training crawlers such as GPTBot or Google-Extended is a policy choice; make it deliberately, and note that AI Overviews use Googlebot, not Google-Extended. Pass: every retrieval crawler is allowed.
2. Check 7 — Bing Webmaster Tools verified, IndexNow on. Bing's index feeds Copilot and parts of other assistants' retrieval, and its AI Performance report is the only first-party record of AI citations a site owner gets. Pass: verified, sitemap submitted, IndexNow pushing changed URLs, report showing data.
3. Check 8 — Google Search Console index coverage. Read the not-indexed reasons under Pages: "Crawled, currently not indexed" is a quality signal; "Discovered, currently not indexed" is usually an internal-linking problem. Pass: every page you want cited is indexed, and the Generative AI report, where available, shows impressions.
4. Check 9 — llms.txt present and honest. An llms.txt file at the root lists your most important pages in plain text. No major engine has confirmed it as a ranking input, so treat it as a cheap tidy-up. Pass: it exists and lists real canonical URLs. See our llms.txt guide.
5. Check 10 — Sitemap and canonical hygiene. Every sitemap URL returns 200, is self-canonical, and uses one URL form throughout (on this site, the .html form). Pass: no duplicates, redirects or 404s; each canonical equals its sitemap URL. The technical SEO checklist for Singapore sites covers the full sweep.

Section C: Entity checks — do engines know who you are?

Assistants name brands they can resolve to one consistent entity. A business described three different ways across its site, schema, LinkedIn and directories is often left out even when crawled.

1. Check 11 — Organization schema. Homepage JSON-LD for Organization (or a subtype such as ProfessionalService) with name, url, logo, a sameAs array of real profiles, and a contactPoint. Pass: valid, present, and the name matches what you use everywhere else. Our schema markup guide for Singapore businesses has a template.
2. Check 12 — Consistent NAP. Name, address and phone identical on footer, contact page, schema and Google Business Profile. Pass: one version of each, everywhere.
3. Check 13 — LinkedIn and company profiles. Description matches your site's one-line positioning; website field points to your canonical domain. Pass: no stale descriptions or old domains.
4. Check 14 — Google Business Profile. Claimed, verified, correct category, current hours, same website URL as your canonical. Pass: live and consistent, even for B2B firms, because it anchors the local entity.
5. Check 15 — Knowledge-base presence. Search Wikidata and Crunchbase for your company. Neither is essential, but a correct entry gives engines a stable identifier. Pass: accurate or absent, never wrong.

Section D: Content checks — is your content extractable?

Engines quote paragraphs, not pages. For each key page, ask whether one paragraph could be lifted out and make sense alone.

1. Check 16 — Answer-first leads. Does the first paragraph answer the page's core question directly, in 40 to 70 words? Pass: yes on every service page and guide.
2. Check 17 — Question-style H2s. Headings read like the next thing a buyer asks, in order, and nest H1 to H2 to H3. Pass: most H2s are questions or clear outcomes.
3. Check 18 — FAQ schema mirrors the visible FAQ. Where a page carries FAQPage JSON-LD, questions and answers must match what a visitor can read. Pass: same count, same wording.
4. Check 19 — Comparison content. Buyers ask "X vs Y" constantly and engines need a source. Pass: each key topic has at least one honest comparison table or section.
5. Check 20 — One page per intent. List your head terms and the page that owns each; two pages on the same question split the signal. Pass: one owner per intent, supporting posts linking to it.

Section E: Authority checks — do third parties vouch for you?

In our own data, the brands engines name most reliably appear on sources other than their own site. Authority is the slowest layer to build, so it comes last in the audit but should not come last in the plan.

1. Check 21 — Third-party listicles. Search "best [your category] Singapore" and open the top ten results. Pass: you appear in at least three independent lists. Appearing in none is the biggest gap most Singapore brands have.
2. Check 22 — Reviews. Google, Clutch, Trustpilot or whichever platform your buyers use. Pass: recent, specific reviews arriving steadily.
3. Check 23 — Directory listings. Industry and major Singapore business directories, with consistent NAP and a live link. Pass: present on the three to five that matter, with no wrong details.
4. Check 24 — Press and mentions. Coverage, interviews, podcasts or event listings that name the company. Pass: several accurate mentions on domains you do not control.
5. Check 25 — First-party data content. Pages publishing your own numbers, benchmarks or price ranges get cited because nobody else can publish them. Pass: at least one page with data only you have.

How do you score the audit and decide what to fix first?

Mark each check pass or fail, then weight the sections. The weights are our working view of what blocks citations most often; the point is an order of operations, not a precise number.

Takeaway: strong on B and C but weak on A means you are ready to be cited and have not yet earned it. Weak on B or C while investing in content means paying for pages that cannot be attributed. Fix B, then C, then D, and start E in parallel because it takes longest.

What should you do with the results?

If Sections B and C are mostly green and you have a writer who knows the category, the rest is a content and outreach plan you can run in-house.

Hire help when the audit exposes a technical layer nobody on your team owns, or when you need someone accountable for measurement. AI Studio's free AI Visibility Audit runs this sequence on your domain and returns a written diagnosis with no obligation. If you then want the work done, the AEO service covers entity, schema and answer-content, and the GEO service covers authority and citation-building across assistants.

Either way, re-run the presence checks thirty days after the fixes land. That comparison, not a score, is the evidence the audit was worth doing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related reading

• Request a free AI Visibility Audit of your domain
• AEO agency Singapore
• GEO agency Singapore
• How to track AI citations month to month
• The complete llms.txt guide
• Schema markup guide for Singapore businesses
• Technical SEO checklist for Singapore sites (2026)
• Enterprise AI search visibility: the Singapore guide