A forensic AI search audit that surfaces every citation gap on your domain.
We audit the schema, entity, passage, and citation layers across your top commercial pages — then hand back a ranked, ROI-scored remediation list your team can ship in the next 60 days.
Most AI search programs start with the wrong fixes.
Without a forensic baseline, teams ship the work that's easy instead of the work that moves the metric. A real audit isolates the 5 issues responsible for 80% of the citation gap.
Generic 'AI SEO' audits miss the layer that matters
Most audits cover keywords. The retrieval layer — schema, entities, passage shape — is barely scored.
No quote-rate baseline
Without a baseline citation rate per engine, you can't measure whether the audit's recommendations worked.
No ROI scoring
200-line audits without prioritization burn months. We score every fix on effort × impact so the team ships the top 20 first.
No competitive context
An audit that doesn't show what the cited competitor is doing differently is half an audit.
A focused stand-up, then continuous operations.
- 01
Quote-rate baseline
Week 1Sample 200 prompts across four engines, log cited URLs and slot positions per prompt.
- 02
Schema & entity teardown
Week 1–2Page-by-page schema audit, sameAs graph mapping, and entity disambiguation review.
- 03
Passage assessment
Week 2–3Top 60 commercial pages assessed for retrievability — passage length, density, entity placement.
- 04
Citation graph analysis
Week 2–3Off-site citation footprint mapped against direct competitors; gaps surfaced with publication-level recommendations.
- 05
ROI-scored deliverable
Week 3Prioritized remediation list with effort, impact, and expected lift per item — ready for sprint planning.
The AdWave AI Search Audits Operating System
A six-layer system we run for every ai search audits engagement — sequenced so each layer reinforces the next instead of competing for attention.
AI Search Audits retrievability baseline
Sample top commercial prompts across every answer engine and log every cited URL, anchor, and competitor — the single number we move.
Entity & schema graph rebuild
Single canonical Organization graph with sameAs to Wikidata, LinkedIn, Crunchbase + Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Product on every commercial page.
Passage-level engineering
60–120 word retriever-friendly answer blocks, structured definitions, comparison tables, bolded entities — formatted exactly the way LLM retrievers chunk.
Citation portfolio seeding
Earned mentions on the third-party sources LLMs lean on hardest — Wikipedia, G2, podcasts with full transcripts, category-defining lists.
Cross-engine measurement layer
Weekly re-prompting across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Overviews with regression alerts and a Looker dashboard.
AI Search Audits continuous ops
Quarterly entity refresh, monthly portfolio review, monthly content velocity calls — AI search shifts weekly, the program shifts with it.
What ai search audits actually does to the trend line.
Indexed cross-engine share of voice over 12 weeks. Brand line trends up as schema, passage, and citation work compound; competitor line is held flat for reference.
What a real AI search audit uncovers.
Median findings from our last 30 enterprise audits. The same five issues account for ~80% of the recommended fixes — but exactly which five varies by category.
AI search audit radar: six-axis assessment scoring schema, entities, passages, crawl, citations, and authority.
Why ai search audits fails as a generic line item — and works as a discipline.
The same budget produces wildly different outcomes depending on how the program is operated. Here's how a generic vendor approaches ai search audits versus how AdWave runs it.
Best for teams about to invest in AI search at scale.
Head of SEO planning a 2026 AI search budget
Triggered when leadership asks 'what's the actual gap?' before approving spend.
We deliver the baseline that justifies the budget and sequences the work.
VP Growth at a Series C scale-up
Triggered when AI search has been on the roadmap for two quarters with no shipped work.
We hand the team a 60-day execution plan they can run themselves or with us.
CMO at a regulated brand
Triggered when compliance and brand teams need a defensible plan before AI search work begins.
We document the entity and citation moves with risk assessments suitable for legal review.
How a b2b saas brand turned ai search audits into a defensible growth channel.
The team had most ai search programs start with the wrong fixes and needed measurable lift inside one quarter. We ran the AdWave AI Search Audits system end-to-end: baseline, framework deploy, weekly ops, and a profit-graded reporting layer the executive team trusts. Results compounded in week 7 once the layers reinforced each other.
Where ai search audits compounds fastest.
Every industry buys ai search audits for a different reason. Below are the patterns we see most.
B2B SaaS
AI Overviews summarize comparison queries without surfacing the brand.
Cited as the recommended option in 4 of 5 buying-stage prompts.
Healthcare & Multi-location
ChatGPT recommends competitors by name in patient prompts.
Branded share-of-voice across LLMs lifts 3.4x in 90 days.
Professional Services
Practice areas invisible to generative engines despite strong rankings.
Practice-area passages cited in 60%+ of high-intent prompts.
Ecommerce
Product comparisons answered without the brand listed.
Product entity authority rebuilt; PDP citations 2.8x.
Fintech & Insurance
Regulated content reads as marketing fluff to LLMs.
Retrievable evidence layer earns expert citations weekly.
Higher-Ed & EdTech
Program pages buried beneath aggregator listicles.
Program entities synthesized into engine answers directly.
Is AI Search Audits the right next move for your team?
- Teams ready to commit a 90-day window for ai search audits to compound.
- Leadership that wants pipeline / revenue reporting, not vanity metrics.
- An in-house operator who can be the day-to-day partner.
- A brand with a real product or service to back the demand we generate.
- Budget headroom to act on the program's recommendations.
- Teams looking for a one-month boost with no follow-through.
- Programs run from a junior contractor with no executive air cover.
- Brands without a defined ICP or measurable funnel.
- Organizations expecting tactical execution without strategic input.
Why teams pick AdWave for ai search audits.
Five reasons the right operating partner changes the ai search audits curve more than another five-figure tooling spend.
Citation engineering since GPT-3.5. Our playbooks are forged from thousands of retrievals, not a Twitter thread.
Schema CI/CD, prompt-evaluation rigs, and warehouse pipelines are built by our engineers — not outsourced to a freelancer marketplace.
No junior account managers. The strategist who scopes you ships the work and runs your weekly review.
Pipeline-grade reporting from AI search clicks to closed-won — not vanity citation counts.
We don't manipulate retrievers. Every tactic survives an engine refresh because the underlying authority is real.
The tools we run inside every ai search audits program.
Every tool below earns its place by accelerating execution, not by adding overhead.
Cross-engine prompt monitoring and SOV.
AI search visibility and citation tracking.
Prompt taxonomy and intent mining.
Enterprise schema deployment + JSON-LD CI/CD.
Classic search and backlink baseline.
Portfolio SOV warehouse and dashboards.
Structured-data audits at scale.
Click-loss attribution from AI Overviews.
Real questions buyers ask about ai search audits.
Pulled from scoping calls — not the generic ones. Three clusters covering scope, measurement, and program fit.
Practices that compound with ai search audits.
End-to-end AI search visibility strategy.
ExploreWin answer panels and conversational results.
ExploreOptimize for generative AI surfaces.
ExploreDominate the Map Pack and local intent.
ExplorePrograms at scale across thousands of pages.
ExploreCrawl, index, performance, schema.
ExploreFind the five AI search issues responsible for 80% of the gap.
We'll deliver a forensic AI search audit covering schema, entities, passages, and citations — with an ROI-scored remediation list your team can ship in the next sprint.
- 5-day turnaround
- No commitment
- Senior strategist call