AI Visibility Baseline (Onboarding)

AI Visibility Baseline (Onboarding)

1. 01

   Inventory every client domain and confirm which crawlers are allowed through robots.txt

   Check GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended directives before promising any AI answer visibility. A blocked crawler makes every downstream metric meaningless.

2. 02

   Run a structured-data pass on the five highest-intent service pages

   Schema coverage on money pages matters more than sitewide percentage. Note missing Organization, Service, and FAQ markup separately so the client sees where the gap sits.

3. 03

   Pull a 90-day rank and click baseline segmented by device

   Q2 2026 data shows desktop click-through rates falling while mobile rates rose at top positions, so a blended number hides the trend the client will actually feel.

4. 04

   Capture branded search volume, GBP website taps, and form submissions alongside call tracking

   Local clients have gained AI-driven search visibility while losing phone calls, and a call-only dashboard turns that pattern into a renewal fight.

5. 05

   Record current AI answer citations for the client's top ten commercial queries

   Log which brands get named and how often. Tools built for this layer, including AthenaHQ and Sight AI, track citation frequency that rank trackers do not report.

6. 06

   Score the technical crawl health of the top 500 URLs by organic revenue

   Crawl budget spent on parameter pages is budget not spent on pages that convert. Prioritize by revenue, not by crawl depth.

7. 07

   Write the baseline into a signed-off document the client approves before work starts

   The approved baseline is the only defensible reference point when a client disputes results at month three.