How to improve your AI visibility: a practical AEO checklist.
A step-by-step checklist for improving how your brand is discovered, understood, cited and recommended across AI platforms including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and Google AI.
What does improving AI visibility actually mean?
Improving AI visibility means increasing the frequency and quality of your brand’s appearance inside relevant AI-generated answers.
That can happen in several different ways. Your company might simply be mentioned, your website might be cited as a source, or your product or service might be actively recommended.
A useful AEO strategy therefore looks beyond “does ChatGPT know our company?” and measures the different forms of visibility separately.
How often does your brand appear in relevant AI answers?
How often is your website used as a source supporting those answers?
How often is your business actively suggested as an option?
How does your visibility compare with the competitors appearing instead?
The extent to which a brand, website, product or service appears within relevant AI-generated answers through mentions, citations or recommendations.
If you’re new to the wider optimisation discipline, start with our guide: What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Establish your AI visibility baseline first.
If you optimise before measuring, you have no reliable way of knowing whether your changes worked.
Start by identifying the questions that matter commercially to your business. These should reflect the actual research, comparison and buying questions a potential customer might ask.
Select genuine customer questions.
Measure more than one AI provider.
Find mentions and recommendations.
Identify cited domains and pages.
See who is winning instead.
“Who is [your brand]?” may prove the AI knows your company, but commercially useful prompts are more likely to ask which provider, product or service somebody should choose.
12 things to check when improving AI visibility.
Work through the checklist in order. Foundations come before content, and content comes before trying to manufacture authority.
Review robots.txt, firewall and CDN rules so the search and AI crawlers you want can access your public content.
Check noindex directives, canonical URLs and other search visibility issues.
Make your products, services, locations, audience and positioning explicit.
Make sure important facts about the company are accurate across your site and relevant external profiles.
Give users a concise answer early and then expand with detail, context and examples.
Build useful topic depth rather than publishing isolated keyword pages.
Use first-party data, examples, experience, methodology, screenshots or useful analysis.
Publish useful facts, research and explanations that can genuinely support an AI-generated answer.
Earn useful coverage, expert contributions, industry references and legitimate mentions.
Create useful comparison, alternative, use-case and suitability content where it genuinely helps customers choose.
Compare their positioning, content, citations and wider source footprint.
Monitor mentions, citations, recommendations, competitors and platform differences after each meaningful optimisation.
Use your existing visibility data to prioritise the areas most likely to explain the gap. A technically healthy website that is already well understood does not need another technical audit simply because you have started doing AEO.
What should you improve first?
Not every business needs the same optimisation. Start with the earliest weak point in your visibility chain.
| What you see | Possible problem | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| AI cannot explain what your company does | Weak entity or brand clarity | Business information and positioning |
| Brand is known but rarely mentioned | Weak topical relevance | Content coverage and prompt alignment |
| Brand is mentioned but site isn’t cited | Weak source value | Original information and citable content |
| Brand is cited but rarely recommended | Decision-stage relevance gap | Comparison content and competitive evidence |
| Competitors dominate every stage | Wider authority or positioning gap | Competitor and source analysis |
“Add schema to every page.”
A generic recommendation applied without evidence that structured understanding is the problem.
Activity without diagnosis.“Build the missing comparison resource.”
Four competitors recommended for a valuable prompt have comparison content and are cited by the same specialist sources.
Specific evidence leads to specific work.Track whether your AI visibility actually improves.
Completing an AEO checklist does not mean the work succeeded. The answers themselves need to change.
Measure brand presence across your tracked prompts.
Track the commercially valuable recommendation questions.
Monitor whether your domain and pages are cited more frequently.
Compare your visibility with competing brands.
Measure each AI platform separately.
Look for movement over time rather than one favourable answer.
Keep your prompt set reasonably stable while testing major changes. Otherwise, changes in the questions themselves can make before-and-after comparisons much less useful.
AEO is a cycle, not a one-time website update.
AI answers, competitors, source selection and your own market change. Your optimisation process should therefore repeat.
Monitor important prompts.
Find meaningful gaps.
Choose the strongest opportunity.
Make the evidence-led change.
Check whether visibility moved.
This might mean improving content , creating information that has a better chance of earning AI citations or investigating why competitors are being recommended instead .
Track AI visibility across more than one provider.
A brand can perform strongly in one platform and poorly in another. Treat each provider as a separate visibility surface.
ChatGPT
Track mentions, recommendations and source visibility across ChatGPT.
ChatGPT visibility →
Gemini
Measure your brand independently across Gemini answers.
Gemini visibility →
Claude
Compare Claude’s answer visibility with other providers.
Claude visibility →
Perplexity
Analyse a particularly source-led AI answer experience.
Perplexity visibility →
Grok
See whether your visibility differs across Grok answers.
Grok visibility →
Google AI
Monitor visibility across Google’s generative search experiences.
Google AI visibility →Useful first-party resources for AEO.
AI search is developing quickly, so check technical assumptions against current documentation from the platforms themselves.
Don’t optimise everything. Improve what the evidence shows.
Zire monitors your AI visibility and turns the gaps it finds into practical recommendations — helping you focus on the content, citations, competitors and visibility opportunities most relevant to your brand.
Questions about improving AI visibility.
Quick answers to common questions about improving mentions, citations and recommendations across AI.
How can I improve my business’s AI visibility? +
Start by tracking commercially relevant prompts and identifying where your brand is absent. Then improve the most likely gap: technical accessibility, brand clarity, content coverage, original evidence, citation visibility, third-party authority or recommendation-stage content.
What is the most important AEO factor? +
There is no single universal AEO ranking factor published across AI platforms. Relevance, useful information, discoverability and trustworthy evidence are strong foundations, but the right optimisation depends on the visibility gap you are trying to solve.
How long does it take to improve AI visibility? +
There is no fixed timeframe. Changes may depend on crawling, indexing, retrieval, source selection and the AI platform involved. Measure the same prompts consistently over time rather than expecting an immediate change after publishing.
Do I need separate content for every AI platform? +
Usually not. Build strong, useful content foundations first. Different AI providers can still surface different brands and sources, so measure each platform independently and investigate meaningful differences where they appear.
Does technical SEO matter for AEO? +
Yes. Important public content needs to be discoverable and accessible. Google’s current generative AI guidance continues to emphasise existing SEO fundamentals, while OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot if you want content eligible for discovery in ChatGPT Search.
Does schema markup improve AI visibility? +
Structured data can help search systems understand content where it accurately represents the visible page, but there is no universal AI-specific schema that guarantees mentions, citations or recommendations.
Should I focus on citations or recommendations first? +
Focus on the earliest meaningful gap. If AI systems barely understand or mention your brand, recommendation optimisation may be premature. If you are already mentioned and cited but rarely recommended, comparison intent and competitive evidence become more relevant.
How should AI visibility be measured? +
Track a consistent group of relevant prompts across multiple AI providers and measure mentions, recommendations, citations, competitor share of voice, source visibility and trends over time.
