The Found-First Visibility Audit tests how the major AI answer engines respond when someone in your market asks who to hire, and whether your business gets named. It is a 45-point inspection: 15 real customer questions run across Google’s AI answers, ChatGPT and Perplexity, every answer screenshotted. You get scored against the competitors currently being recommended, and a prioritized fix list. 48 hours, from $297.

Order Your Found-First Audit ($297)
Single location, one service area. More than one location? Get a scoped quote.

Why does it matter whether AI assistants name your business?

Because a growing share of your customers never see a list of ten options. They get one answer with two or three companies in it, and they call one of those. Google searches ended without a click 68% of the time in the US over the first four months of 2026, up from 60% in 2024, according to SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb clickstream data. For every 1,000 US searches, only 276 clicks now reach the open web.

Page one of Google had ten spots. An answer has one to three. If you are not in it, you lose the job before your phone rings and you never find out it happened. We wrote about the mechanics of this in why customers can’t find your business in AI search. The audit is how you find out where you actually stand.

What exactly does the audit test?

We run a 15-question battery spanning five kinds of customer intent across three answer engines, 45 checks in total, using the real language customers use in your market, your city, your services, your competitors. The five intent groups:

• Hire intent: “who is the best septic company in Kane County?”
• Emergency: “my basement is flooding, who do I call right now in Naperville?”
• Research: “how much does a septic tank replacement cost in Illinois?”
• Trust check: “is [your business name] a good company?”
• Problem aware: “who does trenchless sewer repair near Aurora?”

The engines tested are Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT with search enabled, and Perplexity. Every result is captured as a screenshot, because these answers change and you need the record of what was said on the day it was said.

What kind of problem does it usually find?

Not being named is only the most obvious one. Four things show up repeatedly, and three of them are invisible to the owner until someone runs the questions.

• Absent. You never appear when customers ask who to call. Competitors are named instead, by name, often with phone numbers and hours attached.
• Outranked. You appear, but under companies that are not even based in your town. The engine usually states its reason, and it is usually the review count.
• Misrepresented. The engine describes you wrongly. A wrong founding year, confused with a similarly named company in another state, or actively telling customers to proceed with caution about you.
• Fragmented. The engine treats your listings as two different companies, so years of reviews sit on a profile it cannot connect to you. You earned them and they are not counting.

Why is the engine doing that?

The score tells you where you stand. This part tells you why, and it is the part that makes the fix list short instead of endless.

• Does it hedge? There is a difference between an engine stating a fact about you and saying “according to their website, they claim”. Hedging means it found you but does not trust what it found.
• How many independent sources agree? We count the non-affiliated places that corroborate who you are. Most invisible businesses have one, or none. That single number explains more than any other finding.
• Do your details contradict each other? Name variants, a phone number that differs between listings, conflicting founding dates. Contradictions are a reason to drop a business from an answer rather than risk being wrong about it.
• Which rung are you on? Invisible, visible, understood, recommended. Every business sits on one per engine, and each rung is blocked by something specific. We name what is blocking yours.
• Where do the winners get cited from? We map the sources the engine used for the companies it named instead. That map is the work order, because it is a list of places that already influence the answer in your market.

How is your business scored?

Five pillars, weighted, rolled up into a score out of 100. This measures what the engines did on the day we ran it. It is a measurement, not a projection.

Pillar	Weight	What it answers
AI citation presence	30	Across the 45 checks, how often are you named at all? If you are never named, nothing else matters yet.
Answerable content	25	Is there anything on the open web that answers the questions your customers are asking? Engines quote what exists.
Local trust signals	20	Reviews, recency, and whether your business details agree everywhere the engines check.
Structured data / schema	15	Can a machine read who you are, where you work and what you do, without guessing?
Competitive position	10	Who got named instead, and how often. This is your real competition now, and it is often not who you thought.

Every one of the 45 checks is also marked for position, whether you led the answer or trailed it, and for accuracy, whether what was said about you was correct. Wrong hours, a service you dropped or an old address cost you the job just as surely as not being named.

What do you get?

1. The full report: all 15 questions on all three engines, the answer each one gave, and a screenshot of every result.
2. Your score across the four dimensions above, with the weakest intent group called out.
3. A competitor comparison: which companies the engines recommend in your market, and how often each one appears.
4. An accuracy error list: every wrong fact the engines are currently repeating about your business, so you can go correct it at the source.
5. A prioritized fix list: what to change, in order, with the highest-leverage item first.

How long does it take?

48 hours from order. You do not need to do anything in the meantime. The audit runs entirely on public information, so there is nothing to install and no access to hand over.

How much does it cost?

Pricing starts at $297 for a single-location contractor covering one service area. Businesses with multiple locations, a wider service area, or more competitors to score against are quoted individually. The battery gets bigger, so the work does. One-time either way; there is no subscription attached to the audit.

If you want the fix list executed rather than handed to you, that is the Recovery Program at $750/month, and the $297 audit fee is credited against your first month. It covers the work that actually moves these answers: making your business details identical everywhere the engines check, building review velocity, publishing a machine-readable entity page, building independent sources toward the threshold where an engine will state a fact about you instead of hedging, merging duplicate listings so your reviews all count once, and re-running the same 45 points every month with before and after screenshots. You do not need it to start, and the audit is yours either way.

Who is it for?

Home-service contractors doing roughly $500K to $5M a year, in any US market. That includes HVAC, plumbing, septic and private sewage, water damage restoration, tree service, foundation repair, roofing, and funeral homes. It works for any local service business that customers find by asking a question. The vertical matters less than whether people ask “who should I call” before they call.

It is a poor fit if you do not serve a defined geography, or if you are pre-revenue. There needs to be a business for the engines to find.

How is this different from an SEO audit?

An SEO audit measures how you rank in a list of links. This measures whether you get named in an answer. They are different systems with different inputs.

	Traditional SEO audit	Found-First Visibility Audit
What it measures	Keyword rankings, backlinks, site speed, crawl errors	Whether AI answer engines name you when customers ask who to hire
Where you appear	Position in ten blue links	Inside a one-to-three-business answer
What it tests against	Keywords you chose	Questions your customers actually ask, in your market
What fixes follow	Meta tags, content length, link building	Identity consistency, machine-readable structure, third-party trail, question-answering content

Order Your Found-First Audit ($297)
Single location, one service area. More than one location? Get a scoped quote.

How is this different from the AI Revenue Audit?

The Found-First audit is about being found; the AI Revenue Audit is about what happens after someone finds you. Found-First measures discoverability in AI answers. The Revenue Audit is a five-pillar diagnostic of operational leaks: missed calls, slow speed-to-lead, booking friction, reviews, and follow-up automation. They answer different questions and you can buy either one first. If your phone rings and the jobs still are not closing, start with the Revenue Audit. If the phone is quiet, start here.

What happens after the audit?

Most of the fix list is work you can do yourself, and the report is written so you can hand it to whoever runs your website. The first two items are usually free: correcting your business information everywhere it appears, and completing your Google Business Profile properly. Getting more recent, detailed reviews is usually third. If you would rather have it done for you, we do that too. See services. There is no obligation either way, and the audit is not a sales call in disguise.

Common questions about the Found-First Visibility Audit

Do I need to give you access to anything?

No. The audit runs entirely on public information, the same information the answer engines themselves use. No website logins, no Google account, no analytics access.

Can you audit a business anywhere in the US?

Yes. The audit is delivered remotely and the questions are built around your market, whatever market that is. There is no on-site component.

Will the results change if I re-run it?

Yes, and that is expected. Answer engines update continuously and two runs a month apart can differ even with no changes on your end. That is why every result is screenshotted with a date, and why the re-test program exists for businesses that want to track movement over time.

Do you guarantee I’ll be named?

No, and be skeptical of anyone who does. No one controls what these systems output. What the audit gives you is an accurate picture of where you stand today and the specific, ordered list of things known to influence it. The work is yours to do or ours to do, but the outcome is not something anyone can promise.

Is this a one-time purchase?

Yes. One payment buys the audit and the report, with nothing recurring attached. If you later choose the $750/month Recovery Program to have the fixes done for you, the $297 is credited against your first month, but nothing obliges you to take it.

Why isn’t there one flat price?

Because the work scales with your market. Auditing a single-location contractor in one county is a smaller job than auditing a company with four locations across a metro, more services, and a longer competitor list. The question battery gets bigger and so does the scoring. $297 is the floor, not a teaser; if that is your situation, that is what you pay.

What if the engines already name me?

Then you will find out how often, in what position, against whom, and whether what they are saying about you is accurate. Businesses that are already named most often have accuracy problems rather than visibility problems (wrong hours, dropped services, a stale address), and those cost jobs just as surely as being invisible.

Who runs the audit?

SurgeTick Digital, founded by Edem Agbley. More about SurgeTick.

Order Your Found-First Audit ($297)
Single location, one service area. More than one location? Get a scoped quote.