The first document in a visibility audit should be a record of the business, not a spreadsheet of prompts. Without an agreed account of what the company does, there is no reliable standard against which to judge a search result or AI answer.
I begin by separating facts the business can verify from claims it would like the market to believe. That makes the later audit less vulnerable to flattering but inaccurate descriptions.
Establish an approved factual record
Confirm the public trading name, current offer, customer type, location or service area, main website and contact route. Add any qualification that materially changes the offer, such as appointment-only visits or delivery limited to particular regions.
Identify who approves each field. A marketing page may contain old information; it should not become the source of truth merely because it is public.
Keep promotional claims in a separate column. “We provide remote consultations” is a checkable service detail. “We are the most trusted specialist” needs a different kind of evidence and may not belong in the record at all.
The practical profile guidance on Sparlab is part of a broader effort to make this information easier for businesses to organise, but the approval still has to come from the business.
Inventory consequential public sources
List the homepage, service and product pages, About page, contact page, relevant listings and active social profiles. Add known partner pages and older pages that customers may still encounter.
Record the exact URL, who controls it and the date checked. Avoid claiming the inventory covers the whole web. It is a defined set of sources selected for relevance and likely use.
For eligible Google Business Profiles, Google's business representation guidance provides rules about how the business should be presented. A general website audit does not replace checking the requirements of each platform.
Compare the facts, not just the wording
Different pages can use different language while describing the same business accurately. A short social bio need not reproduce an About page word for word.
Look for contradictions in meaning: a different service area, an unavailable product, an outdated owner or an implication that customers can visit an address where they cannot.
Rank errors by consequence. An incorrect contact route is usually more urgent than inconsistent punctuation. A false claim about service availability can matter more than a missing keyword.
Our discussion of what AI search can establish explains why public inconsistency is a problem before any generated answer is considered.
Check whether people can reach the information
Open the pages without relying on a signed-in account. Follow the important links and inspect the result on a phone.
For search-specific questions, use the appropriate tools. Google's URL Inspection documentation explains what an inspected URL can reveal about its status. A browser visit alone does not establish that a page is indexed, and an indexed page is not guaranteed visibility for a particular query.
Keep access, indexing and actual discovery as separate checks. Combining them under “SEO health” can hide the problem you need to solve.
Add prompts after the baseline exists
Choose questions tied to real customer decisions and preserve the relevant context. Record the exact wording, date, service and visible sources for each observation.
Now you can compare an answer with approved facts rather than deciding whether it sounds favourable. A recommendation containing the wrong service area is not a clean success.
Do not keep changing the questions until the business appears. If exploratory questions are useful, label them separately from the repeatable set.
Deliver a correction list before a score
The first output should identify the inaccurate or unclear fact, the affected URL, the responsible owner and the proposed correction. Include any uncertainty that still requires confirmation.
A dashboard can come later. A precise correction list already gives the business something useful to do and a way to check that the work was completed.
A visibility audit starts to earn its value when it makes the public business easier to understand accurately. Prompt testing is one part of that work, not the substitute for knowing what should be true.