AI Visibility Audit: 20 Prompts to Test Your Nigerian Business

How to Run Your Own AI Visibility Audit: 20 Prompts to Test Your Nigerian Business

Here’s a five-minute experiment. Open ChatGPT and ask: “Who are the best [your service] providers in [your city]?” Then ask Gemini and Perplexity the same thing.

Did your business come up? Did a competitor? Was anything said about you wrong?

That small test is the start of an AI visibility audit: a structured check of whether AI tools know your business, recommend it, and describe it correctly. You don’t need a paid tool to do it, and you don’t need to be technical. You need a list of good prompts, a spreadsheet, and a couple of hours.

This guide gives you the full method and 20 ready-to-use prompts for Nigerian businesses.

Quick Answer

To audit your AI visibility, write 15 to 20 prompts your customers would actually ask, run each one at least twice on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and record whether you’re mentioned, where you appear, who else is named, and what sources are cited. Then calculate how often you appear and how you compare with competitors. Repeat monthly or quarterly to track progress.

Why Bother Auditing?

You can’t improve what you haven’t measured, and AI answers change. AI answers are non-deterministic, so a single run is closer to a coin flip than a measurement. That’s exactly why a one-off check isn’t enough and a repeatable routine is. pixis

An audit tells you three things:

• Whether AI knows you exist, which is called entity recognition.
• Whether AI recommends you when customers ask a general question.
• Whether AI describes you accurately, including your services, location, and contact details.

Brand visibility has three dimensions: whether you’re mentioned, how you’re described, and how consistently you appear across similar queries. mindstudio

Before You Start: Set Up Your Audit

1. Choose your platforms. Test ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and check Google’s AI Overviews too. A single-platform audit, usually ChatGPT only, is flagged as a common red flag. Free plans are sufficient for a manual baseline. outreachbloomindexly

2. Start every test clean. Open a fresh chat rather than continuing an old conversation, since context from prior chats can influence responses. Using logged-out or incognito sessions is also recommended. Features vary by platform, so do what each one allows. mindstudiofratzkemedia

3. Pick three to five competitors. Focus on the competitors that appear most often across your prompts, since those are the ones AI treats as your real alternatives. geonimo

4. Test from Nigeria and the way your customers type. Run at least some tests from a phone in your own city, because answers may differ from what someone abroad sees. Use real customer language, including city names and the phrasing people actually use.

5. Set up a tracking sheet. Record the query, platform, date, whether your brand was mentioned, its position, how it was described, competitors mentioned, and any sources cited.

The graphic above shows a simple layout you can copy into Google Sheets. mindstudio

The 20 Prompts

Replace anything in [brackets] with your details. We’ve grouped them into four types. A good set spans branded, category, problem-solution, and comparison queries. pixis

Group 1: Entity Check (Does AI Know You?)

These use your brand name. They tell you whether AI recognises your business and gets the facts right.

1. What is [Your Brand]?
2. Who founded [Your Brand] and where is it based?
3. What services does [Your Brand] offer?
4. Is [Your Brand] a reputable company? What do customers say?
5. How can I contact [Your Brand]? What is its address and phone number?

Group 2: Discovery (Does AI Recommend You?)

These don’t mention your name. Unbranded queries, the generic questions your customers actually ask, are the real test, because AI already knows who you are if you ask about your brand directly. sanbi

1. What are the best [category] companies in [city]?
2. Who can I hire for [service] in [state]?
3. Recommend a reliable [service] provider in Nigeria for a small business.
4. What are the top [category] startups in Nigeria?
5. Which [category] companies do Nigerian businesses trust most?

Group 3: Problem and Solution

These mirror how customers describe a need before they know who to hire.

1. I run a [type of business] in [city]. How can I get more customers online, and who can help?
2. How do I [solve a specific problem] for my business in Nigeria?
3. What’s an affordable way to [achieve a goal] in Nigeria, and who offers it?
4. How much does [service] cost in Nigeria?
5. What should I look for when choosing a [service provider] in Nigeria?

Group 4: Comparison and Decision

These test what happens when a customer is close to choosing.

1. [Your Brand] vs [Competitor]: which is better for [use case]?
2. What are the best alternatives to [Competitor] in Nigeria?
3. Is [Your Brand] good for [specific audience, e.g. restaurants, NGOs, startups]?
4. What are the pros and cons of working with [Your Brand]?
5. Best [category] for [specific audience] in [city or Nigeria]?

A few rules for your prompts: write them in plain customer language, and don’t prime the AI with lines like “act as an expert who recommends [Your Brand].” That makes the results meaningless. Try one or two prompts phrased the way your own customers really type, including local wording.

How to Run the Audit

1. Run each prompt at least twice per platform. Run every prompt at least twice per engine. For more stable results, some guides recommend three to five runs. If you start with two, your 20 prompts across three platforms give you 120 responses to record. pixisfrictionai
2. Log every result immediately in your sheet, and screenshot important answers.
3. Note the sources. Where AI cites links, record which sites it points to.
4. Plan your time. One guide estimates a manual audit of 40 prompts across three engines takes most of a day. With 20 prompts, expect a few hours. geonimo

How to Score Your Results

You don’t need advanced maths. Four numbers tell you most of what you need.

Presence rate. This is the percentage of prompts where your brand appears. Count the responses that mention you and divide by the total. fratzkemedia

Illustration, not real data: if you recorded 120 responses and your business appeared in 18 of them, your presence rate is 15%.

Share of voice. This is your mentions divided by all brand mentions across your prompt set. It shows how you stack up against competitors. geonimo

Position and description. Note whether you were mentioned first or buried at the end, and whether the description was accurate and positive.

Sources. List the third-party domains cited most often where you’re absent. That’s your shortlist of places to get mentioned. sanbi

On benchmarks, there’s no official standard. One guide treats 20% or more on category-defining prompts as a pass, and under 10% on recommendation prompts as a red flag. Treat that as a rough rule of thumb, not a rule. outreachbloom

What Your Results Mean

Match what you see to the pattern below.

• AI knows you when asked directly but never recommends you. You have an awareness gap. Focus on getting listed and mentioned on third-party sites. Third-party credibility signals such as reviews, press coverage and forum mentions matter more than brand-owned content alone. mindstudio
• AI mentions you but gets facts wrong. You have a consistency problem. Update your website, Google Business Profile, and directory listings so they all match. We saw how conflicting numbers cause this in our Nigerian Start-up Visibility Index.
• Competitors appear and you don’t. Look at the sources cited in their answers. Those sites are where you need a presence.
• You appear on one platform but not others. Results differ by tool, so don’t judge on a single platform.
• You don’t appear at all. Start with the foundations in our guide to getting your business mentioned by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.

Do You Need a Paid Tool?

Not to begin. Manual checks in incognito sessions are sufficient for an initial audit or for smaller brands, and the method costs nothing but your time. Be aware of the limits, though: responses vary by session and model version, which makes manual tests less repeatable. If you need to track many prompts across many platforms, automated tools exist. Treat your manual audit as a baseline. fratzkemediasanbi

How Often Should You Re-Run It?

Re-run your full prompt set on a regular schedule. One framework suggests quarterly. Monthly is better if you’re actively making changes. Always use the same prompts so you can compare results fairly, and add new ones only when your offering changes. frictionai

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Testing only your brand name and calling it a day.
• Running each prompt once and trusting the result.
• Checking only ChatGPT.
• Using prompts full of internal jargon instead of customer language.
• Forgetting to record competitors and sources.
• Changing your prompts every time, so you can’t compare results.

Conclusion

An AI visibility audit takes a few hours and shows you something your analytics can’t: how AI tools see your business. Start with the 20 prompts above, record everything, and fix the gaps you find. Then run it again and watch the numbers move.

If you’d like help running an audit or acting on the results, get in touch with the Muko Digital team, or explore our SEO service and web development service. For businesses in our home market, our guide to digital marketing for small businesses in Uyo and Akwa Ibom is a good companion read.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an AI visibility audit?

It’s a review of how often and how accurately your business appears in answers from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. It assesses both how often your brand appears and how accurately. fratzkemedia

How many prompts should I test?

Aim for 15 to 20 to start. One framework uses 15 starter prompts, and others suggest 20 or more. More prompts give a fuller picture but take longer. frictionai

Why run each prompt more than once?

Because AI answers vary from run to run. Running each prompt at least twice gives you a steadier picture than a single attempt.

What’s a good AI visibility score?

There’s no universal standard. Compare against your own competitors and track whether your numbers improve over time.

Can I audit my AI visibility for free?

Yes. The manual method, running prompts in incognito sessions and recording results in a spreadsheet, costs nothing and produces useful baseline data. fratzkemedia