How to Audit Your Brand’s AI Search Presence (And 5 Ways to Improve It)

If your ideal customer opened up ChatGPT right now and asked, “What is the best [insert your product/service] in Australia?”… would your business show up?

More importantly, if they specifically asked an AI search about your brand, what would it say?

We are officially in a new era of search. Alongside traditional SEO, we now have AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation).

Which if you ask me, are essentially the same thing – optimising your website and online presence to be recommended by the likes of Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.

And the good news for Australian small businesses? The ‘optimisations’ you do for AI also benefit your SEO, in fact a lot of the AI optimisations that experts around the world are recommending, have been trusted SEO optimisations for years!

Here at Grand Cru Digital, we are helping our clients navigate this shift. Today, we’re going to walk you through how to run a quick DIY audit of your brand’s AI presence, check your actual data, and implement 5 tips to help you become the go-to expert the AI wants to cite.

Step 1: The “Vanity” Audit (Ask the AI)

The first step is simple: you need to find out what Large Language Models (LLMs) aka the ChatGPT’s of the world currently “know” about your business.

Open up the big three (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini) and type in a few prompts:

• “What is [Your Brand Name]?”
• “What are the core services of [Your Brand Name] based in [Your City]?”
• “Who are the main competitors for [Your Brand Name]?”

What to look for:

• Is the information accurate? AI models scrape historical data. If you recently dropped a service, changed your pricing, or stopped stocking a specific brand, the AI might still be telling customers outdated information.
  
  Real life example: For a floristry client of ours in Western Australia, ChatGPT kept referring to an old shop location they were at 10 years ago, before becoming a solely online operating business. This information was being pulled from old business directory listings of theirs. So we spent time getting in touch with those directories to remove or update those mentions.
  
• What is your positioning? Does the AI describe you as a “budget option” when you actually sell premium services?
  
• Do you exist at all? If the AI hallucinates (makes things up) or says it doesn’t have enough information, it means your website isn’t feeding it the structured data it needs to understand who you are.

Step 2: Review Your Actual AI Search Traffic Data

Once you know what the AI thinks of you, it’s time to see if it is actually sending you any traffic. AI engines are no longer just enclosed chat boxes; they provide clickable citations and links back to the source.

Here is where to look:

1. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Head into your Acquisition reports and look at your Referrals. You might be surprised to see domains like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, or claude.ai popping up. While it might only be a small percentage of your overall traffic right now, take note of which pages these users are landing on. Are they reading your blogs, or going straight to your product pages?

Here’s what we do for our clients: We create an AI traffic report in GA4 like this and you can also grab our free Looker Studio AI Traffic template so you can super easily look at your AI data over time.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools If you aren’t using Bing Webmaster Tools yet, now is the time to start. Because Microsoft integrates heavily with Copilot, Bing offers a dedicated AI Performance Report. This won’t just tell you about click-throughs; it will actually show you how often your website is being cited in AI-generated answers.

Step 3: Train the AI to Recommend You (5 Actionable Tips)

If your audit revealed that the AI has outdated info, or doesn’t know you at all, don’t panic. You can train these engines to view your brand as the ultimate, factual authority in your space.

Here are 5 tips we use at Grand Cru Digital to help our clients show up in AI tools:

1. Be Direct with a “TL;DR” AI bots are lazy readers. They want the facts, fast. Put a concise, bulleted summary (a “TL;DR” or Key Takeaways section) at the very top of your core service pages or blog posts. This allows bots to easily scrape and serve your key points without having to dig through paragraphs of text. You could also use a table of contents to highlight the key sections of your page. Just think of this as giving you the most important information about your page ASAP to the user.
   
2. Answer the Real Questions People don’t just search “buy running shoes” anymore; they ask, “What are the best wide-toe running shoes for bad knees?” Target these conversational, long-tail questions. Add an FAQ section to all your key pages and use FAQ structured data code to spoon-feed the exact answers directly to the engine and most importantly PEOPLE!
   
3. Lean Heavily into E-E-A-T Generative AI favours true experts over generic websites. Make sure your content has robust author bios and highlights first-hand, human experience (e.g., “After testing this software for 3 years…” or “Why I formulated this product…”). Human experience is your biggest advantage over AI!
   
4. Build Your “Off-Page” Authority AI doesn’t just read your website; it reads what everyone else says about you. Earning mentions in listicles, Reddit threads, local directories, and digital PR trains the AI to recognise your brand as a trusted industry leader.
   
   GCD tip: Subscribe to SourceBottle – this is a global publicity platform where journalists, editors and media put call-outs for sources.
   
5. Keep It Fresh AI models prioritise recency. They want to give users the most up-to-date answer possible. Regularly audit and update your top-performing pages. If your content is stale, the AI will pull from a competitor who published yesterday. And when updating content, don’t forget to add your unique value to it – this will stand out to AI tools.

Ready to blend SEO with AEO/GEO?

Search is evolving fast, but the core principle remains the same: provide the best, most accessible answer to your customer’s problem.

If you need help navigating the new world of AEO, GEO, and AI search, here at Grand Cru Digital, we are fully on board and ready to help. Get in touch with us today to chat about unlocking your brand’s search potential.

(And if you’re curious… our agency’s tool of choice right now is usually Gemini with a bit of Claude mixed in! What’s yours?)