The AI Search Audit: 3 Steps to See Where Your Brand Shows Up in AI Summaries

Your rankings report says nothing about whether Google’s AI summaries mention your brand. Search Console counts AI feature traffic inside its regular Web results and offers no separate filter, so the only way to know is to check. An AI Overviews audit is that check. It takes three steps and a spreadsheet, and it ends with a list of gaps you can hand to someone.

How often do AI summaries actually appear?

Two facts shape the audit. Summaries appear on a minority of queries, and the share moves a lot. In the Semrush data it rose from 6.49% in January 2025 to a peak in July and then fell back by November.

The mix changed as well. Informational queries made up 91.3% of AI Overview queries in January and 57.1% by October, as commercial, transactional and navigational queries picked up share. A query that never showed a summary last year may show one now, so an AI Overviews audit has to test queries instead of assuming.

Step one: which of your queries trigger a summary?

Start with what Search Console already holds. Export the top queries from the Performance report for the last three months. Google says traffic from AI features is included in the Web search type, with no separate filter for AI features (Google Search Central), so the export shows which queries earn impressions but not which ones carried a summary.

Pick 25 to 30 queries across four types: your brand name, your category terms, comparison searches and the questions customers ask before buying. Search each one in a logged-out window from the market you serve, and record whether an AI Overview appeared and whether AI Mode returned an answer. The sheet below carries all three steps of the AI Overviews audit.

Branded queries are the quickest to check and the most revealing. If the summary for your own name cites other sites, the AI Overviews audit has already found its first gap, and it is worth noting before moving on to category terms.

Query research from Search Console is the base layer of our SEO services built on Search Console query research, which is why the audit starts there.

Step two: who does the summary cite?

For every query that shows a summary in your AI Overviews audit, open the sources and log each cited domain. Google says it uses query fan-out, which finds more supporting pages and lets it show a wider and more diverse set of links than traditional results (Google Search Central). Expect more domains per query than a classic results page would show.

Then sort each domain into a source type. Peec analyzed 30 million cited sources across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews in the US in March 2026, and Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Forbes topped its list, with G2 and Yelp also in the top ten (Peec). That list spans five platforms and one country, so use it as a guide to what to look for, not a forecast for your category.

The count by source type is the finding of an AI Overviews audit. A category where reviewers and forums fill most citations needs a different plan from one where competitors’ own pages do. Reading which outside sources shape an answer is the core of our GEO services for AI summary visibility.

Step three: how do you close the gap query by query?

Start with eligibility. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link, and that there are no additional technical requirements and no special optimizations (Google Search Central). For each query where you are absent, find the page that should answer it and confirm it is indexed and not blocked from snippets. Our step-by-step GEO framework for ChatGPT answers covers what else moves other assistants.

If no page exists for the query, the gap is content. If the page exists and is eligible, the summary preferred other sources, and the source types from step two show which kind. Where forums and review sites dominate, the move is earning an accurate presence there. Where competitors’ pages dominate, compare what their pages state that yours does not.

Write the result as one line per query with a named owner: content, technical or off-site. That sheet is the output of the AI Overviews audit, and it is how we scope the first month of work in our SEO and GEO methodology.

After a fix ships, wait for the page to be recrawled before judging it, and test the same query again in the next cycle of the AI Overviews audit instead of the next day.

When should you re-run the AI Overviews audit?

Semrush’s trigger share moved from 6.49% to 24.61% to 15.69% within one year, so a single pass goes stale quickly. Re-run the same query set each quarter, keep the older sheets, and compare the three columns that matter: which queries show a summary, which domains are cited, and whether your pages are among them.

What does the evidence not show?

Semrush measures keywords in its own database, not your queries, and Peec’s study is a vendor analysis of five platforms in one country and one month. A manual AI Overviews audit is a snapshot, since what appears can vary by location, device and time, and Search Console cannot isolate AI feature traffic. None of these sources measures how much traffic a citation sends, so the audit tells you where you appear, not what it is worth.

What is Skyfield’s position: audit the summary, then the sources behind it?

The summary is only the visible layer. The useful finding is which sources fill it and whether your pages are eligible to compete, because that tells you whether the fix is a page, a technical issue or a presence you have to earn elsewhere. Run the AI Overviews audit on a fixed query set, label every result as a snapshot, and assign each gap to an owner. Results from this kind of work are documented in our published SEO and GEO case studies.

Frequently Asked Questions

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