AI Answer Gap Audit (Onboarding)

AI Answer Gap Audit (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Pull the client's top 20 commercial pages and their current organic positions

   Export from whatever rank tracker the account already runs (SE Ranking, SISTRIX, or Semrush all export cleanly) so the baseline is defensible in the kickoff deck.

2. 02

   Write the five buyer questions the client's sales team hears most often

   Interview one rep or read the last 30 days of inbound chat logs. These questions, not keyword volumes, become the audit spine.

3. 03

   Submit each question to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews and record whether the client brand appears

   Capture screenshots with timestamps. A brand can hold page one on Google and be entirely absent from AI answers, which is the gap this audit exists to price.

4. 04

   Build the gap table: topics where the client ranks top 10 but is missing from AI-generated answers

   Sort by estimated commercial value, not by traffic. Ten high-intent gaps beat a hundred informational ones in the client conversation.

5. 05

   Check whether AI crawlers can actually read the site

   Verify robots.txt treatment of GPTBot and ClaudeBot, confirm server-side rendering or pre-rendering, and flag any client relying on client-side JavaScript for primary content.

6. 06

   Score entity coverage against two named competitors

   List the people, products, and category terms competitors are associated with in AI answers and the client is not. This becomes the topic authority roadmap.

7. 07

   Package findings as a standalone paid audit deliverable before folding into the retainer

   Price it as a fixed-fee diagnostic. Agencies that give this away in the pitch lose the easiest margin expansion available in the category.