Overview
Audits are the core of Cited. They measure how well AI engines represent your business by asking real questions to real AI providers and analyzing the responses. This guide explains how to build audit templates, run audits, and read your results.
What Are Audit Templates?
An audit template is a reusable set of questions designed to test how AI search engines respond to queries relevant to your business. Instead of creating questions from scratch every time you want to run an audit, you build a template once and reuse it as often as you need.
Templates are valuable because they enable consistent measurement over time. When you run the same set of questions against the same providers on a regular schedule, you can track whether your AI visibility is improving, declining, or holding steady.
You can create as many templates as you like. Some common approaches include:
- A core brand template with questions about your company, products, and leadership.
- A competitive template focused on comparison queries like "What is the best [product] for [use case]?"
- An industry template covering broad questions prospects might ask about your market.
Creating a Template
To create a new audit template, navigate to the Audits section and click New Template. The creation process involves three steps.
Naming Your Template
Give your template a clear, descriptive name. Good names make it easy to identify templates later, especially if you manage multiple businesses or run different types of audits. For example, "Q1 Brand Visibility - Acme Corp" is more useful than "Test Audit."
Adding Questions
Questions are the heart of your template. Each question represents a real query that a user might type into an AI search engine. Write questions the way a real person would ask them -- natural, conversational, and specific.
Strong audit questions tend to follow a few patterns:
- Direct brand queries: "What does [Company Name] do?"
- Category queries: "What are the best [product category] tools?"
- Comparison queries: "How does [Company] compare to [Competitor]?"
- Use-case queries: "What is the best solution for [specific problem]?"
- Reputation queries: "Is [Company] trustworthy?"
You can add questions manually one at a time, paste a batch of questions, or use Cited's AI question generation feature.
Selecting Providers
Choose which AI providers you want to include in your audit. Cited supports multiple providers including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and others. Selecting multiple providers gives you a comprehensive view of your visibility across the AI landscape.
Different providers may represent your business very differently. Running multi-provider audits helps you identify where you are strong and where you need to focus your optimization efforts.
AI Question Generation
One of Cited's most powerful features is the ability to auto-generate relevant audit questions. When you click Generate Questions, Cited uses the business information you have provided -- your name, industry, description, website content, and buyer personas -- to create a set of questions that real users are likely to ask AI engines about businesses like yours.
Generated questions cover a range of angles: brand awareness, product comparisons, industry expertise, and use-case relevance. You can review the generated questions, edit them, remove any that are not relevant, and add your own before saving the template.
This feature is especially useful when you are getting started and are not sure what to test, or when you want to expand an existing template with fresh question angles.
Running an Audit
Once your template is ready, click Run Audit to start. Here is what happens behind the scenes:
- Query dispatch -- Cited sends each question in your template to every selected AI provider, just as a real user would.
- Response capture -- The full response from each provider is recorded, including the text, any citations or sources mentioned, and the structure of the answer.
- Analysis -- Cited evaluates each response to determine whether your business was mentioned, how prominently it appeared, whether the information was accurate, and what sources the AI cited.
- Scoring -- Each question receives a visibility score, and an overall audit score is calculated across all questions and providers.
Depending on the number of questions and providers, an audit typically takes a few minutes to complete. You will receive a notification when results are ready.
Reading Your Results
Audit results are presented at multiple levels of detail so you can get both a quick overview and a deep dive.
Question-Level Performance
Each question shows how each provider responded. You can see whether your business was mentioned, the sentiment of the mention (positive, neutral, or negative), and how prominent your mention was relative to competitors.
Citations and Sources
Cited identifies the sources that AI providers referenced in their responses. This tells you which websites, articles, or data sources are influencing how AI engines talk about your business and your market. Understanding your citation profile is critical -- if AI engines are drawing from sources that do not mention you, that is an opportunity to improve.
Provider Comparison
When you run a multi-provider audit, Cited generates a side-by-side comparison so you can see how your visibility varies across platforms. You might be well-represented in ChatGPT but invisible in Gemini, or vice versa. This comparison helps you prioritize your optimization efforts where they will have the most impact.
Best Practices
- Run audits regularly. Monthly audits let you track trends and measure the impact of your optimization work.
- Keep templates consistent. Changing questions between runs makes it harder to compare results over time. Add new questions to new templates rather than modifying existing ones.
- Use multiple providers. AI visibility varies significantly across platforms. A single-provider audit gives you an incomplete picture.
- Review citations carefully. The sources AI engines cite often reveal the fastest path to improving your visibility.