Sample audit.
This is a condensed version of a real AnswerFirm audit, anonymized. The client is a globally regulated online broker with strong SEO and a two-decade track record — exactly the kind of brand that assumes it's fine. It wasn't fine. It wasn't a disaster either. The interesting part is where the line fell.
Sample of the query matrix
Finding 1 — Strong where buyers already know you. Absent where they don't.
Brand-trust queries: strong
Deep third-party review coverage means "is [brand] safe" queries return favorable, well-cited answers across every engine. The brand's award positions in specialist categories are repeated verbatim by AI.
Category-discovery queries: invisible
On generic "best [category]" queries — the highest-intent class — AI answers name six to eight competitors and never the client. The buyer who doesn't already know the brand never will.
Finding 2 — Five websites decide the category
Across 50 queries, the same five review/affiliate domains supplied the majority of citations behind every engine's answers. The client's AI visibility is set less by its own site than by its position inside those five sites' rankings. That reframes the fix: part on-page work, part placement strategy.
Finding 3 — A freshness leak
The blog went quiet; the webinars can't be cited
Content production had shifted to webinars and podcasts — formats AI engines can't quote. A third-party reviewer publicly noted the stale blog. The cheapest high-impact fix in the entire audit: transcribe existing audio into dated, schema-marked articles. The content already exists.
Roadmap (condensed)
Weeks 1–4: open AI crawler access, publish llms.txt, transcribe the webinar backlog, add FAQPage schema to trust pages. Months 1–3: honest comparison pages against the four most-cited competitors; restructure key stats into extractable, dated tables; publish original monthly data the category's five deciding sites will want to cite. Quarterly: placement strategy inside those five sites, focused on the niche categories where the brand already wins.
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