AI Visibility Audit Lite

This is a small, shareable command-line tool for testing AI visibility with your own DataForSEO or SerpApi credentials.

It is intentionally conservative. It does not pretend to measure "true AI visibility." It helps you run a repeatable prompt set, repeat each prompt, capture raw provider responses, extract brand mentions and cited domains, and export the results for review.

What It Can Do

• Run the same prompt multiple times.
• Query DataForSEO Google AI Mode.
• Query SerpApi Google AI Mode.
• Optionally query both providers for the same prompts.
• Detect brand and competitor mentions in the extracted response text.
• Extract URLs/domains when the provider returns citations or links.
• Export raw JSON and a flat CSV.
• Run in --dry-run mode without API credentials.

What It Cannot Do

• It cannot replicate a real user's ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode experience.
• It cannot account for memory, personalization, account tier, MCP/tools, private data, or conversation history.
• It cannot infer the internal query fan-out that produced a response.
• It cannot tell whether every answer came from parametric memory or live retrieval unless the provider response exposes sources.
• It cannot produce a universal visibility score that is comparable across tools.

Use it as a learning and audit aid, not as a source of false certainty.

Install

cd ai-visibility-audit-lite
npm install

No external npm packages are required. Node 18+ is enough.

Configure Credentials

Export credentials in your shell:

export DATAFORSEO_LOGIN="your-login"
export DATAFORSEO_PASSWORD="your-password"
export SERPAPI_KEY="your-serpapi-key"

Or copy .env.example to .env and source it yourself:

set -a
source .env
set +a

Dry Run

npm run dry-run

This writes sample output without calling any paid API.

Real Run With SerpApi

node bin/ai-visibility-audit.mjs \
  --provider serpapi \
  --brand "YourBrand" \
  --competitors "CompetitorA,CompetitorB" \
  --prompts prompts.example.json \
  --runs 5 \
  --out reports/yourbrand-serpapi

Real Run With DataForSEO

node bin/ai-visibility-audit.mjs \
  --provider dataforseo \
  --brand "YourBrand" \
  --competitors "CompetitorA,CompetitorB" \
  --prompts prompts.example.json \
  --runs 5 \
  --location "United States" \
  --language en \
  --out reports/yourbrand-dataforseo

Output

The tool writes:

• <out>.json: full raw audit data.
• <out>.csv: one row per prompt run.

The CSV includes prompt, provider, run number, brand mention, competitor mentions, citation domains, response length, and any API error.

Methodology Rule

Do not rely on one prompt and one run.

Start with at least:

• 20-50 prompts for a small topic cluster.
• 3-5 runs per prompt.
• Separate reports for each provider/platform.
• Manual review of raw answers before making business decisions.

For high-stakes reporting, use larger prompt sets and compare against first-party evidence such as Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance, server logs, AI referrals, branded search, and conversion data.

Provider Notes

DataForSEO Google AI Mode ignores user preferences, search history, and other personalized factors in order to emulate a clean localized result. That is useful for controlled testing, but it is not the same as a real user's personalized session.

SerpApi Google AI Mode can return a subsequent_request_token for follow-up questions. This CLI does not use multi-turn conversations by default because the goal is to keep each prompt run auditable and independent.

License

MIT. Use it, fork it, and improve it. Please keep the caveats visible.