Search, Answer and Assistant Visibility Audit.
Three retrieval systems, three different units of success, and one column that most of the industry is currently leaving out: how much of this you actually control.
Where this brand is genuinely findable, across three surfaces that behave differently.
The PDF carries its original title, SEO, AEO and GEO Visibility Audit. We use plainer wording here: the three surfaces are classic search, answer engines and AI assistants, and treating them as one discipline rather than three named specialisms is the point of the instrument.
The browser version keeps everything on your device. Nothing you type is sent to aFactor.
What has to be true first.
- Search Console and analytics access.
- A list of the twenty queries that matter commercially, not the two hundred that have volume.
- A way to check how AI assistants currently describe this brand and category. Manual checks are acceptable and currently more honest than most tooling.
Its stated limits.
- It will not tell you how any generative system ranks or selects sources. Nobody outside those companies can tell you that, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
- It has a short half-life. Check the review date at the foot of this page before relying on the surface definitions.
- It does not cover content quality, only its retrievability. A well-structured page that says nothing will be extracted and ignored.
- Manual assistant checks are a small, non-representative sample. Treat them as a baseline to watch, not as a measurement.
8 sections, and what each one makes you write down.
The three surfaces, and why they are not the same thing
- Surface
- What is retrieved
- What success is
- How much you control
- Controllable · influenceable · not controllable
Surface one · Classic search baseline
- Query
- Intent
- Current position
- Page
- Commercial value
- Which of these queries still produce clicks, and which are absorbed by answer features
Surface two · Passage readiness
- Check
- Present?
- Where it fails
Surface three · Entity consistency
- Claim about the brand
- How we state it
- How third parties state it
- Consistent?
- How the major assistants currently describe this brand
Machine readability
- Item
- Status
- Action
Third-party corroboration
- Source type
- Do we appear?
- Accurate?
- Action
Prioritisation by controllability
- Finding
- Surface
- Controllable · influenceable · not controllable
- Business impact
- Priority
Measurement plan, including what cannot be measured
- What we will report
- Confidence
- Cadence
- What we are explicitly not able to measure, and what we will say about it
Questions the template makes you answer.
- If traffic halved but the brand became the source cited in AI answers, would this client call that a win, and have you had that conversation yet?
- Which of your recommendations is a causal bet rather than an observed relationship, and is it labelled as one?
- What would you stop doing if classic search traffic became a minority of discovery for this category?
- Which finding is in the controllable band but has been ignored for months because it is unglamorous?
What you are left holding.
A three-surface audit with every finding tagged for controllability, a prioritised action list, and a measurement plan that states in writing what cannot currently be measured.
Published open. Copy it, adapt it, use it on client work. If you pass it on, keep the attribution line on it.
Sixty-five instruments, eighteen published open.
Each one names the decision it protects, states what it will not do, and ends in something you could defend six months later.