# AI Visibility Assessment | RedactLabs

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AI VISIBILITY

# What AI answers read about you.

When someone asks Google, Copilot or ChatGPT to recommend a local business, the answer can draw on listings, reviews and the pages crawlers were allowed to read. The AI Visibility Assessment checks each of those for your business, ranks what to fix, and records a baseline in the reports Google and Microsoft now publish.

WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS

## Mostly, it’s still the basics.

Google’s own guide to its AI search features, published in May 2026, says optimizing for them “is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” It says Google Search ignores AI text files such as llms.txt, that structured data isn’t required, and that original, useful content will likely matter more in the long run than anything else in the guide. It also says Business Profile and Merchant Center can help a business be visible in AI responses.

So we don’t sell AI text files as a ranking lever. We work on what the platforms themselves point to — listings, reviews, crawler access and your own pages — and we report with the numbers the platforms now publish, not with one-off screenshots of an AI answer.

Source: [Google Search Central — AI optimization guide (last updated July 10, 2026)](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide)

LISTINGS

### Listings

Your listings are the facts the platforms already hold about you.

Name, address, phone, hours, categories and photos, checked and corrected on the platforms behind the major search and AI products.

- Google Business Profile · Categories, hours, services, photos and attributes checked against reality. Google says Business Profile can help your products and services be visible in AI responses as well as in regular search results.
- Bing Places · Claimed and kept current. Microsoft says registering with Bing Places helps keep your address, hours and contact details current and eligible for inclusion in its AI-generated responses.
- Apple Business · Your place card in Apple Business, which replaced Apple Business Connect in April 2026. Apple says the place card displays across Apple Maps, Safari, Spotlight and more.
- Yelp · Claimed and accurate. Yelp says its content is powering local discovery for ChatGPT and its other AI partners.
- Merchant Center · For businesses that sell products: a complete product feed, which Google names alongside Business Profile as something that can help.

CRAWLER ACCESS

### Access

An assistant can only cite pages its crawler was allowed to read.

We check your robots rules and sitemap and, on Cloudflare zones, the AI bot policies that decide which bots get through.

- Robots rules & sitemap · Search and answer crawlers allowed, nothing important hidden, and a sitemap they can find.
- Cloudflare AI bot policies · Since July 2026, Cloudflare lets every plan allow or block AI bots by behaviour: Search, Agent or Training. We check each zone’s setting against what you actually intend.
- The training-block trap · Since September 15, 2026, blocking Training on Cloudflare also blocks mixed-purpose crawlers, including Googlebot, Bingbot and Applebot, so it affects your search visibility too. Cloudflare’s newer Disallow AI Training setting refuses training while keeping those crawlers in search. Cloudflare says Apple, Google and Microsoft honour it or have committed to, with Microsoft’s support targeted for early 2027. We check which one each zone uses.

REVIEWS

### Reviews

Ask every customer the same way, and never pay for it.

A review routine that stays within Google’s Maps review policy.

- Ask everyone · The same request to every customer after the job, not only the happy ones. Google bans selectively asking for positive reviews.
- No incentives · No discounts, gifts or payments in exchange for reviews. Google bans them.
- No staff quotas · Staff aren’t given a number of reviews to collect, customers aren’t asked to name a staff member, and staff don’t review their own workplace. Google’s policy covers all three.
- What’s at stake · Google removes reviews that break the policy. For fake or incentivized reviews, Google says a profile can also be blocked from receiving new reviews for a set period and shown with a warning to customers.

CONTENT

### Content

Pages that answer the questions your customers actually ask.

Google’s guide puts original, useful content ahead of every other suggestion. We compare your pages with the queries Search Console and Bing report for you.

- Service & area pages · One clear page per service and per area you serve, in your own words.
- Facts in text · Prices, hours, service areas and policies written as text on the page, not locked inside images or PDFs.
- Structured data, where it earns its place · Google says structured data isn’t required for its AI features. We keep it for the rich results it does support, and don’t sell special AI markup.

MEASUREMENT

### Measure

First-party numbers, not screenshots.

Google and Microsoft now both report how often your site appears in their AI answers.

- Search Console: Generative AI report · Impressions for your pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. Google says it rolled the report out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026; a site needs enough AI impressions before data shows. Clicks from those features are counted in the regular Performance report.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: AI Performance · Citations of your pages in Microsoft Copilot, Bing’s AI summaries and select partner experiences, with the grounding queries behind them. Since June 2026 it also previews Citation Share and query intents, including Local.

Sources: [Search Console Generative AI report](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139) [Bing AI Performance and Bing Places (Feb 2026)](https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/February-2026/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview) [Bing Citation Share and intents (June 2026)](https://blogs.bing.com/search/June-2026/New-AI-Visibility-Insights-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Intents-Topics-Citation-Share-Compare) [Apple Business](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/introducing-apple-business-a-new-all-in-one-platform-for-businesses-of-all-sizes/) [Yelp Q2 2026 results](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001345016/000134501626000059/yelpq2-26ex991pressrelease.htm) [Cloudflare AI traffic options](https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-07-01-ai-traffic-options/) [Cloudflare Disallow AI Training](https://blog.cloudflare.com/accountable-mixed-use-ai-crawlers/) [Google Maps review policy](https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114) [Business Profile restrictions](https://support.google.com/business/answer/14114287)

## WHAT DOESN’T WORK

Said plainly.

- llms.txt as a Google lever · Google says Search ignores AI text files like llms.txt: publishing one neither helps nor harms your visibility in Google Search. The probe below reports whether you publish one; we don’t sell writing one as a visibility fix.
- Special AI markup · Per Google, there is no special schema.org markup for its AI features. Structured data stays for the rich results it supports.
- Bought or filtered reviews · Incentives, asking only happy customers and review quotas for staff all break Google’s policy. Google removes those reviews, and fake or incentivized ones can get new reviews blocked on your profile.
- Guaranteed placements · AI answers change from one query, person and day to the next. Anyone promising a fixed spot in them is guessing.

## THE DELIVERABLE

A baseline, the fixes, then the numbers.

- Baseline report · Listings, crawler access, reviews and content checked against everything above, with each gap and who can fix it: you, us, or the platform.
- Prioritized fixes · Every gap in order of impact. If we make the fixes as well, that’s a separate scope, quoted on the call.
- Measurement set-up · Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools verified for your site, their AI reports read, and a baseline recorded before anything changes.

Assessment: fixed-fee, $2,950 CAD.

## EVERY MONTH

The same numbers, every month.

- AI impressions · Search Console Generative AI impressions by page, against last month and the baseline.
- AI citations · Bing AI Performance citations, cited pages and grounding queries, with Citation Share and intents where Bing shows them.
- Listings & reviews · Listings on Google, Bing, Apple and Yelp re-checked against your real details, and new reviews counted by platform.
- Crawler access · Robots rules and Cloudflare bot policies re-checked, so a settings change that shuts out search crawlers is caught within the month.
- One page of notes · What changed, what moved, and what we recommend next. Plain language.

Monthly measurement: $250 CAD/month, included in Website Care Pro.

## THE LIMITS

What the numbers are, and aren’t.

- Volatile answers · AI answers vary between queries, people and days. A good month can be followed by a flat one for reasons outside anyone’s control.
- Impressions and citations · The reports count impressions and citations as Google and Microsoft define them. They aren’t rankings, and they only cover what Google and Microsoft report on.
- No guarantees · We don’t promise placements, citations or traffic. We promise the checks, the fixes we agree on, and honest numbers.

## One part, checked live.

The machine-readable part of the assessment, run live: whether crawlers can reach and map your site, and which optional agent files it publishes. It can’t see your listings, reviews or Search Console data — the assessment covers those. Enter a public hostname you control. No signup, no email.

## Start with the baseline.

[contact@redactlabs.ca](mailto:contact@redactlabs.ca) Fixed-fee · scoped on the discovery call

CLARITY BEFORE COMPROMISE.

Built and managed by RedactLabs. Toronto, ON