New Jersey Tech, Business, & Creative Resources
New Jersey Tech, Business, & Creative Resources
AI Visibility (GEO/AEO) Audit
Your Rankings Look Fine. Your AI Visibility Might Not Be.
ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Claude are becoming the first — and sometimes only — place buyers look before they ever hit your website. This is a hands-on audit built around a proprietary diagnostic tool and run personally by Eric Hebert, a 20-year SEO veteran who has advised hundreds of businesses, from independent local shops to Inc 5000 agencies to Fortune 100 brands like Adobe and MolsonCoors.
Request an Audit →AI Search Doesn't Read Your Page. It Retrieves Pieces of It.
Here's what most businesses don't realize: when an AI assistant answers a question, it usually isn't reading any single page start to finish. It's pulling short passages — chunks of content, sometimes just a paragraph — from dozens of competing sites, and assembling an answer out of whatever fits.
That has a consequence nobody's tooling was built to catch. If the claim you're making sits in one paragraph and the proof sits in the next one, the retrieval system can grab the claim and leave the evidence behind. A half-answer, stripped of the context that made it credible, rarely gets used — and the AI moves on to a competitor's page that said the same thing in one self-contained block.
None of this shows up in Google Search Console. None of it shows up in a rank tracker. A page can be sitting in position one on Google, driving traffic exactly like it always has, while it's already invisible to the AI assistants an increasing share of your buyers are asking first. Rankings and AI visibility are no longer the same scoreboard — and most businesses are only watching one of them.
AI Visibility Is Not an llms.txt File or a Schema Tag. That's All Bullshit.
If you've talked to an agency about "AI visibility" or "GEO" in the last year, there's a good chance the pitch came down to two things: add an llms.txt file, and slap some schema markup on your pages. Neither one is wrong to do. Both are also nowhere close to the whole job — and treating them like the finish line is exactly why so many "AI-optimized" sites still don't get cited.
What an llms.txt file actually is: a plain-text file at the root of your domain that lists your key pages in plain language, meant as a signpost for AI crawlers. It's a genuinely useful pointer. It is not a ranking factor, it doesn't make your content easier to retrieve or cite once an AI assistant is actually reading it, and most of the models doing real-world AI Overviews and chatbot answers today don't even consistently respect it. It's one small item on a checklist, not a strategy.
What schema markup actually is: structured data — a block of code that tells a search engine explicitly "this is a product," "this is an article," "this is a review" — instead of making it guess from the page content. It genuinely helps machines understand what a page is. What it does not do is fix a page that opens with three paragraphs of throat-clearing before it answers the question, or a claim sitting three sentences away from the evidence that backs it up, or a site that simply doesn't have a page for the question your buyer is actually asking. Schema tells a machine what something is. It says nothing about whether the content itself is usable once a machine finds it.
Both of these get sold as "AI visibility services" because they're cheap to deliver, easy to show on an invoice, and simple to explain in a sales call. They're also the part of this work that's genuinely automatable — which is exactly why they've become the whole product for a lot of agencies chasing this space. This audit checks both of them, because they matter. It just doesn't stop there, because stopping there is how you end up ranking fine in Google and getting skipped by every AI assistant your buyers actually ask.
The Difference
This Isn't a Prompt-Tracking Tool
A lot of what gets sold as "AI visibility" right now is a dashboard: type in some prompts, see whether your brand got mentioned, watch a number move. That tells you whether something's wrong — never why, and never what to do about it. Same problem with the cookie-cutter automated report: run your URL through a generic checklist, get the same twenty recommendations regardless of what your business actually does.
What This Isn't
- A prompt-tracking dashboard that just reports a score
- A generic, automated checklist report
- The same 20 recommendations for every site
- A report nobody actually read before it was generated
What This Is
- A proprietary diagnostic tool built specifically for AI retrieval
- Every finding reviewed personally against your business
- Recommendations tied to your goals, audience, and competitors
- Hands-on consulting from a 20-year SEO veteran
Run Personally by Eric Hebert
20 Years of SEO, Applied to How AI Actually Reads a Site
I've spent 20 years in SEO, working across nearly every size and shape of business there is. I've run audits and built strategy for small, local, owner-operated companies where every single lead mattered, for agencies inside the Inc 5000, and for Fortune 100 brands — including Adobe and MolsonCoors — where the stakes and the scale were entirely different.
That range matters here. AI visibility work right now is full of people selling theory. I've spent two decades watching what actually changes rankings, traffic, and revenue versus what just sounds good in a deck — and I'm applying that same discipline to how AI assistants evaluate and cite a business. This audit is the tool I built to do that work at the level I'd want it done for my own clients, and I run every single one myself.
What's Included
What the Audit Actually Covers
1
Full Technical & Structural Scorecard
Five weighted categories: crawlability for AI bots, structured data, answer-ready content structure, authority & trust signals, and topical coverage — scored item by item, not summarized away.
2
Chunk-Retrievability Analysis
The diagnostic most audits skip entirely. Every key page is split into passages and evaluated in isolation, the way a real AI retriever would process it — showing exactly which sections are citable as-is and which need rework.
3
Competitor Benchmarking
The businesses you're actually competing with for AI citation, run through the same rubric — so you know precisely where you're ahead and where you're not.
4
Prioritized Recommendations
Every finding synthesized into a report ranked by real priority and effort, tied to your specific goals and audience. Not a checklist — a strategy.
The Process
How It Works
1
Kickoff & Onboarding
Before anything gets audited, you'll fill out an onboarding document covering your named competitors, read access to Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, the keywords and topics you want to own, your business goals for the engagement, and who your audience really is. This isn't a formality — the recommendations in your final report are only as good as the context behind them.
2
The Audit
I crawl the site, run the full technical scorecard, and put your highest-value pages through chunk-retrievability analysis. Your named competitors get benchmarked against the same rubric.
3
Review
I go through every finding personally against what you told me in onboarding — your goals, your audience, your competitive set — before a single recommendation gets written.
4
Delivery
You get a full report, walked through directly — not emailed over and left to interpret alone.
Included
A 60-Minute Strategy Call With Me
The audit doesn't end at the PDF. Every engagement includes a live, one-on-one 60-minute call with me — not a scheduling-tool "onboarding call," not a handoff to whoever's available. We go through what the audit actually found, and then we talk about how to fix it: what to prioritize first, what's worth doing in-house versus outsourcing, and how the findings map to the resources you actually have.
On the PR & Citation Side
That's where most audits stop. This one keeps going into the part almost nobody actually helps with: earning the links, citations, and mentions that make an AI assistant trust your business enough to recommend it. Not "build your brand" or "do more PR" — real, specific plays for your business: which publications and sites in your actual space are realistic targets, what kind of content or data would make them want to mention you, where your competitors are getting cited that you aren't, and what the fastest, most credible way in looks like for your industry. You leave the call with a short list of moves you can actually start making, not a lecture on brand awareness.
The Deliverable
What You Walk Away With
A complete, client-ready report — not a spreadsheet of raw data.
- A cover page framing what the audit is and how to read it, prepared specifically for your business
- The full technical scorecard, item by item, showing exactly what passed and what didn't, with the evidence behind each answer
- Page-by-page chunk-retrievability findings for your key content, including which specific passages need rework and why
- A prioritized set of recommendations — ranked Critical to Low, tagged by effort and type — grounded in your actual audit results, not generic best practice
- Named content gaps: specific topics and page types your competitors are covering that you aren't
- A short list of quick wins you can act on immediately
- A 60-minute live strategy call with me — fix-it priorities plus specific PR and citation plays for your business
Fit
Who This Is For
This Is For You If
- You're serious about being found, cited, and recommended by AI assistants
- You want to know exactly why, not just whether, something's wrong
- You're ready to act on what the audit finds
This Isn't For You If
- You want an automated, one-click score and nothing else
- You're looking for a report to skim and shelve
- You're not planning to act on the findings
Let's Find Out What AI Search Actually Sees
If your business depends on being found — and increasingly, being found means being cited by an AI assistant before a person ever clicks a link — this is the audit that tells you where you actually stand, and exactly what to fix first.