How do I check a prospect's AI search visibility before a sales call?
Run their domain through an AI-visibility audit and walk into the call with their competitive gap, share of voice, and citations already in hand. Here's the workflow.
By Josiah Jirgens, Technical Director of ComKey Consulting
To check a prospect's AI search visibility before a sales call, run their domain through an AI-visibility audit tool that returns presence, share of voice against competitors, the competitor leaderboard, and the citations AI engines pull. ConvertHook produces this report on any domain in about a minute — designed for exactly this prospecting-opener workflow. You walk into the call with the prospect's situation already in hand: invisible or not, against which competitors, with what gaps.
This is one of the highest-leverage moves an agency can make before a sales call in 2026. It costs almost nothing, the prospect doesn't have to do anything, and it changes the conversation from "tell me about your business" to "I noticed three competitors are showing up for your category and you're not."
The pre-call workflow
Five minutes the morning of the call:
- Open the audit tool. ConvertHook works from a single domain submission.
- Enter the prospect's domain. Their main site is enough; you don't need login or access.
- Wait for the report. Roughly a minute. The tool queries multiple AI engines, parses answers for mentions, and aggregates the result.
- Skim the headline numbers. Presence (yes/no), share-of-voice percentage, the top three competitors the AI cites for the category.
- Note one or two specific findings to bring up. The "you're not there, these three are" finding tends to land hardest.
That's it. You arrive at the call with concrete data the prospect almost certainly hasn't seen.
What to look for in the report
- Presence — is the brand cited at all for the queries that matter to its category, or invisible?
- Share of voice — when it is cited, how often versus competitors?
- The competitor set — which brands the AI recommends instead. Usually the most uncomfortable finding for the prospect and the most useful for the call.
- Citation sources — which pages the AI pulls from to build its answer. These are the levers an agency can move.
The first three are conversation-starters. The fourth is the budget-justifier: it shows what an engagement would change.
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Why this beats reading their website beforehand
Reading the prospect's website tells you what they think they're known for. The AI audit tells you what the AI engines actually say about them — often a very different story. Most prospects assume they show up in AI search; most don't. That asymmetry is the conversational lever. You're not arguing about whether they have a problem; you're showing them the problem with their name in it.
It also flips the call's structure. Instead of you asking discovery questions and the prospect rehearsing their pitch, you open with a finding and the prospect explains. They do most of the talking, and you book the next step with much higher conviction.
For the deeper playbook on running these audits as a service, see how to offer AI-visibility audits as an agency service. For what the audit checks, what is an AI-visibility audit.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- How long does an AI-visibility audit take to run on a prospect's domain?
About a minute end-to-end with a purpose-built tool. You enter the domain, the tool runs queries against multiple AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews), parses the answers for brand mentions, identifies the cited sources, and assembles the result into a report. You don't need access to the prospect's analytics or any login; the audit runs entirely from the public domain.
- What should I show the prospect from the audit on the sales call?
The "you're not there, these competitors are" finding is the one that lands. Pull up the competitor leaderboard with their name (absent or low) next to the brands that show up for their category. The citation list — the pages AI is pulling from — is the follow-up: it shows what an engagement would change. Don't dump the whole report; pick the two or three findings that frame the call.
- Can I run a prospect audit without their permission?
Yes — the audit runs on the public domain, the same way Google's index does. You're not accessing private data or anything that requires permission. Most agencies treat the audit as the equivalent of looking at a prospect's website before a meeting: standard prep, not surveillance.
More in Education (GEO/AI)
- How do I show a prospect which competitors are winning in AI search?
Run an AI-visibility audit on the prospect's domain and pull up the competitor leaderboard. Here's how to surface "you're not there, these three are" in a sales call.
- AI Search Optimization for Agencies: The Monthly Workflow
How an agency runs AI search optimization for clients in 2026: the onboarding audit, the monthly workflow (content, mentions, consistency, reporting), what you deliver each month, and how to scope it.
- What Is an AI-Visibility Audit? What It Checks and What the Report Shows
What an AI-visibility audit is, what it checks (presence, share of voice, competitors, citations, sentiment), what the report looks like, how it differs from a traditional SEO audit, and who runs one.