What We Found
In October 2026 we ran our own AI visibility audit on inflomedia.com.au. Across all five AI engines that can currently be tracked commercially — Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — we recorded zero brand mentions and zero link citations.
Twenty-plus published articles. Fourteen service pages. Nothing.
We're publishing that because we sell AI search visibility, and an agency that won't show its own number is asking you to take the method on faith.
The Table
Brand presence counts how often a brand is named in an AI answer. Link presence counts how often a page is cited. Share of voice is the combined share across the set. Data from the SE Ranking Australian database, snapshot 1 October 2026.
| Domain | Brand presence | Link presence | Share of voice |
|---|---|---|---|
| semrush.com | 15,531 | 26,742 | 72.7% |
| smartcompany.com.au | 1,876 | 5,093 | 11.1% |
| neilpatel.com | 566 | 5,434 | 8.2% |
| onlinemarketinggurus.com.au | 1,076 | 3,050 | 6.5% |
| impressivedigital.com | 572 | 8 | 1.5% |
| webprofits.com.au | 12 | 42 | 0.1% |
| inflomedia.com.au | 0 | 0 | 0% |
Four things worth reading out of it, and none of them are about us.
Being named and being cited are different problems. Impressive Digital records 572 brand mentions and 8 link citations. Mentions come from third-party lists, directories and press. Citations come from your own pages being crawlable and extractable. Same category, opposite profiles, completely different work to fix each.
A well-known agency can be close to invisible. Web Profits has operated in Australia for well over a decade and scores 12 and 42. Whatever this channel rewards, it isn't longevity or reputation alone.
The realistic target is Online Marketing Gurus, not Semrush. 1,076 and 3,050 is what a focused Australian agency footprint looks like. Semrush at 15,531 and 26,742 is a global software company with a decade of content behind it.
Nobody in this set is unreachable. The gap between 0 and 12 is a few third-party mentions. The gap between 12 and 1,076 is two years of consistent work.
Where the Australian Volume Actually Sits
The other finding, and the one that changed what we're doing.
Per-engine citation counts for Online Marketing Gurus, the strongest Australian agency in the dataset:
| Engine | Brand named | Pages cited |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overviews | 661 | 2,397 |
| Google AI Mode | 178 | 347 |
| ChatGPT | 183 | 185 |
| Perplexity | 36 | 119 |
| Gemini | 18 | 2 |
AI Overviews produced roughly thirteen times ChatGPT's page citations. Gemini — the engine clients ask about by name more than any other except ChatGPT — produced two.
Nine of our first twenty published articles were written primarily for ChatGPT visibility. That was a defensible call a year ago and it's a partial strategy now. The work has rebalanced toward Google's AI surfaces, which has the convenient property of being the same work that wins ordinary rankings.
The Method, So You Can Repeat It
Nothing here requires a tool you don't have.
Twenty prompts, written before you look at any answers. In four shapes: situational scenarios, direct recommendation requests, comparisons, and category questions. Written the way a buyer would ask a knowledgeable friend, not the way a marketer phrases a keyword.
Run each across every engine you can reach. Fresh session per prompt, location set explicitly, same week each month.
Two columns, not one. Named, and linked. Keep them separate.
Record who else appears. The competitors who keep showing up tell you where the citations are coming from, and you can go and read the sources.
Date everything. A number without a date is a claim, not a measurement.
It takes about ninety minutes. The full version is in how to measure whether AI tools recommend your business.
What We Checked on Our Own Site
Running the audit meant auditing ourselves, and some of it was unflattering.
Crawler access: fine. robots.txt allows GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot. Two of the Anthropic tokens listed are retired ones, which is cosmetic since the wildcard allows everything, but it's the kind of staleness that suggests the file was written once and left.
llms.txt: out of date. It describes us as "a Melbourne-based creative and digital media agency" with no mention of SEO, AI search or paid media, and it omits all seven Melbourne service pages: the highest commercial-intent pages on the site.
Entity signals: incomplete. Our structured data lists LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and a Google Maps link. There is no X profile, which is the single clearest gap for Grok, whose differentiator is a native connection to X's live stream. We wrote about that in does Grok recommend businesses while having exactly that gap.
Six service pages had no title tag. Six of our seven national service pages served an empty <title> element and no og:title. Long pages, full schema, nothing for Google to display. We found that by reading our own served HTML, which is not a thing most agencies do to themselves.
What We Think the Zero Means
Two honest readings, and we think both are true.
It's a timeline, not a failure. AI citation moves on a three-to-six-month horizon for ChatGPT, and the content programme is inside that window rather than past it. Expecting citations from articles published weeks ago would be expecting something the mechanism doesn't do.
And publishing alone was never going to be enough. This is the thing we tell businesses who ask about AI visibility, and the audit confirmed it on us. Citations follow from third-party corroboration, entity consistency and crawler access, and two of those three were incomplete on our own site while we were busy publishing. That's the sequence error we warn clients about, which is a reasonable thing to admit having made.
The lesson we'd take from our own data: fix the entity and corroboration side first, then publish. We did it in the other order.
What Happens Next
The baseline is dated 1 October 2026. We'll re-run it monthly and publish what it says, including if it doesn't move.
What we're doing in the meantime: titles on the six service pages, llms.txt rewritten to describe the business we actually are, a decision about X rather than a vague intention, and third-party corroboration work that doesn't involve publishing anything on our own site.
What we're not doing: promising a number. AI systems are non-deterministic, nobody controls the ranking, and any agency guaranteeing you a position in an AI answer is making a claim about something they can't deliver, which is exposure under Australian Consumer Law and a reason to walk, including if we ever said it.
If you'd like the same audit run on your business, that's the free AI visibility audit: twenty prompts, four engines, dated, and the raw results are yours whether or not you work with us. Our AI marketing page covers the service, and what AI SEO actually involves covers the mechanics.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AI visibility audit?
A structured check of whether AI systems name and cite your business. You run a fixed set of twenty buyer prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI surfaces, record separately whether your brand was named and whether a page was linked, note which competitors appeared, and date the results so the next month's run means something.
Why did Inflo Media publish its own zero score?
Because an agency selling AI search visibility that won't show its own measurement is asking clients to take the method on faith. A baseline of zero is still a baseline, and it's the only thing that makes the next month's figure meaningful. It also illustrates the timeline honestly rather than implying results arrive faster than they do.
Which AI engine matters most for Australian businesses?
Google's AI Overviews, by a wide margin. In our October 2026 Australian data it produced roughly thirteen times ChatGPT's page citations for the strongest local agency in the set, and Gemini produced two. The useful part is that the work winning AI Overviews is largely the work that wins ordinary Google rankings.
What's the difference between brand presence and link presence?
Brand presence is how often an AI answer names your business; link presence is how often it cites one of your pages. They have different causes (mentions come from third-party sources, citations from your own content being extractable) and a business can score high on one and near zero on the other.
How long does it take to appear in AI search results?
Three to six months is the realistic window for ChatGPT, which updates its understanding of a business slowly. Google's AI Overviews can move faster because they draw on the live search index. Nobody controls the timing, and an agency quoting a guaranteed date is describing something it cannot deliver.
Is publishing content enough to get cited by AI?
No, and our own audit demonstrated it. Citations follow from third-party corroboration, entity consistency and crawler access as much as from content. We published twenty articles while our own entity signals and llms.txt were incomplete, which is the sequence error we warn clients about.
Can an agency guarantee my business appears in ChatGPT?
No. AI systems are non-deterministic, so the same prompt can return different businesses on different runs. A guarantee of a specific position is a claim about something nobody controls, and under Australian Consumer Law it creates exposure for the business making it. Treat it as a reason to walk away.
What should I fix first if no AI tool mentions my business?
The foundations, in this order: crawler access including firewall rules, consistent business details across every profile that describes you connected through sameAs structured data, genuine reviews, and mentions on sites you don't control. Content comes after those, because AI systems assemble answers from what already exists about you.
How often should an AI visibility audit be repeated?
Monthly, in the same week each time and with word-for-word identical prompts. Model updates land continuously, so a fixed point in the cycle keeps the comparison honest. Changing a prompt resets the series, and running at irregular intervals makes it impossible to separate a real change from normal variation.
Which AI engines can't be tracked by any tool?
Claude and Grok. No commercial visibility platform currently reports citations from either: not SE Ranking, not Semrush, not the AI-visibility startups. Both can only be measured by running prompts manually and recording the results. If an agency claims to track your Grok visibility, ask to see the unedited output.