The 6Signal Visibility Audit: What We Measure and Why

Most audits are too narrow.

An SEO audit checks rankings, titles, meta descriptions, backlinks, site speed, and technical issues.

A local SEO audit checks Google Business Profile, reviews, citations, proximity, categories, and Maps performance.

A website audit checks design, conversion, copy, and UX.

Those are useful.

They are not enough.

The buyer journey has expanded.

A contractor or local service company can be visible in Maps and still absent from AI answers.

It can have a clean website and still be unclear to answer engines.

It can have good reviews and still fail to connect those reviews to its highest-value services.

It can rank for a keyword and still be skipped when the buyer asks who to call.

That is why the Visibility Audit exists.

Short answer

The 6Signal Visibility Audit scores six signals — GEO, AEO, LEO, VEO, PEO, and IEO — that together determine whether a company is easy to find, understand, verify, and recommend across modern search: AI assistants, Google's AI answers, Maps, directories, voice assistants, and the indexed web underneath all of them.

It is not just an SEO audit.

It is a signal audit.

The goal is to identify why a company appears, gets skipped, or gets replaced by competitors and aggregators when buyers ask high-intent questions.

Why rankings alone are incomplete

Rankings still matter.

But rankings do not tell the whole story.

A company can rank for "roof repair Dallas" and still be absent when a buyer asks:

Who is the best roofer near me for storm damage?

A company can appear in Maps and still be skipped when a buyer asks:

Which HVAC company can fix my AC today?

A company can have traffic and still lose buyers because the service page is vague, the reviews are generic, and the CTA is weak.

The audit needs to measure the whole path — six distinct systems, each of which independently forms the buyer's shortlist.

The six signals we measure

1. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization

The recommendation layer.

We test buyer-style prompts against generative AI — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude — and track:

Whether the company is named
Whether it is recommended, or merely mentioned
Which competitors appear instead
Whether directories replace local companies entirely
Which prompts trigger visibility, and which skip the company

This is not perfect science. AI output varies. But repeated testing reveals patterns — and patterns are what the audit scores.

2. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization

The citation layer.

Google's AI features answer questions directly, above the results. We measure:

Whether the company is cited in AI-generated answers for its trade and market
Which sources those answers cite instead — and why
Whether the company's pages are answer-ready: direct questions, direct answers, in formats engines can quote
FAQ, comparison, and cost-explanation coverage

AI features in Google Search are built on Google's broader Search systems and indexed content — which is why this layer sits on top of fundamentals, not beside them.

3. LEO — Local Entity Optimization

The trust-data layer, and for local companies, the foundation.

We ask:

Is the business name, phone, and service area consistent everywhere?
Is the Google Business Profile complete — categories, services, hours, photos, description?
Do the directories that AI systems read — Yelp, BBB, Angi, trade associations, local publications — confirm the same entity, or leave a vacuum for aggregators to fill?
Do reviews carry machine-usable specificity?

If the web does not agree on who the business is, answer engines have less confidence.

That is the Local Entity Gap.

4. VEO — Voice Engine Optimization

The hands-free layer.

Voice queries are urgent, local, and return one or two names — not ten. We measure:

What Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant return for the trade near the city
Whether the Apple Maps / Apple Business Connect presence is claimed and accurate
Whether the local data voice assistants read resolves cleanly to the company

Voice mostly inherits from the local entity layer — which is exactly why entity cleanup pays twice.

5. PEO — Prompt Engine Optimization

The query-language layer.

Buyers ask problem-first questions:

What should I do when this breaks, leaks, fails, cracks, backs up, or stops working?

We measure whether the company surfaces inside the real language buyers type and speak:

Emergency and same-day queries
Cost and comparison questions
The full question cluster a buyer walks through before choosing — and which of those questions the company answers versus leaves to a competitor or a directory

6. IEO — Index Engine Optimization

The machine-readability layer.

Every other signal depends on machines being able to read the company at all. We check:

Indexing, crawlability, sitemap, canonicals
Page titles, headings, internal links, and mobile experience
Schema — present, valid, and honest: Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList
Whether service pages are structured so systems can extract what the company does and where

The rule for markup is simple: it should clarify visible truth, not invent authority.

Why we measure Google Business Profile

For local companies, Google Business Profile is one of the strongest entity surfaces — the local entity hub, not just a listing.

Google's local ranking guidance describes relevance, distance, and prominence as key local ranking factors and recommends complete, accurate business information.

We check primary and secondary categories, services, service area, hours, phone, website, description, photos, reviews, review responses, and consistency with the website and directories.

If the profile is incomplete, inaccurate, or too broad, the business is harder to match to high-intent local queries — in Maps and in every AI system that grounds on Maps data.

Why we measure reviews differently

Most audits count reviews.

We go further.

We ask:

Do reviews mention specific services?
Do they mention locations?
Do they mention urgency?
Do they mention outcomes?
Are they recent?
Are they distributed across platforms?
Are they used on relevant service pages?

A review that says "great service" is not as useful as one that says "they repaired our sewer line in Fort Worth the same day."

Specific reviews create stronger human and machine signals. That makes reviews entity data — part of LEO — not just social proof.

Why we measure directories and aggregators

Directories are not dead.

They often appear in AI answers because they are structured, category-specific, location-aware, and review-rich.

We look at Yelp, BBB, Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Houzz where relevant, manufacturer and trade association directories, local chambers, and local publications.

The question is not whether every directory matters equally.

The question is whether the source ecosystem confirms the business or leaves a vacuum for aggregators to fill.

Why we measure question clusters

A single service page is rarely enough.

The buyer has a decision path.

For emergency plumbing, that path might include:

What should I do when a pipe bursts?
Where is my shutoff valve?
Should I call a plumber or restoration company first?
How much does emergency plumbing cost?
Who is open now near me?

If the company does not answer these questions, another source will.

The audit identifies which clusters are missing and which should be built first. This is where PEO and AEO meet: prompt coverage decides which questions matter, answer-ready content decides who gets cited for them.

Why we measure competitor and aggregator visibility

Your visibility only matters in context.

We compare:

Who appears instead of you?
Are competitors clearer?
Are directories replacing local businesses?
Are competitors getting cited?
Are they winning because of reviews?
Do they have better service pages or Google Business Profiles?
Do they have better question coverage?

This helps separate opinion from priority.

The seventh check — which is not a signal

Visibility is not the final goal.

Booked work is.

So the audit also reads the conversion path: CTA clarity, phone visibility, form friction, the emergency call path, mobile UX, and follow-up risk.

Conversion is not one of the six signals, because it is not visibility — it is what visibility is worth. A company that wins every signal and misses its calls has bought traffic for its voicemail. When conversion is the real bottleneck, the audit's roadmap says so, plainly, before recommending any visibility work at all.

What good prioritization looks like

Not all fixes are equal, and the leverage usually runs in a consistent order:

LEO — entity cleanup, Google Business Profile, reviews. It moves Maps and AI recommendations at the same time, because AI grounds its local answers in exactly this data.
IEO — schema and structure. Cheap, one-time, and everything else depends on it.
AEO — answer-ready service pages and question coverage. This is what earns citations.
GEO and PEO — third-party presence and prompt coverage. These compound over months on top of the first three.
VEO — mostly inherited from clean local data.

A company with no emergency plumbing page should not start with a blog post about plumbing history. A roofer with inconsistent service areas should not start with a new logo.

Prioritization depends on bottleneck. The audit identifies the highest-leverage signal gaps first.

What the audit is not

It is not a guarantee of rankings.

It is not a guarantee of AI recommendations.

It is not a magic GEO hack.

It is not a generic SEO checklist.

It is not a replacement for business fundamentals.

It is a diagnostic.

A good diagnostic does not promise the outcome.

It shows what is blocking the outcome.

The 6Signal view

Modern visibility is not one channel.

It is six signals, working as one system: GEO, AEO, LEO, VEO, PEO, IEO.

The companies that win will not necessarily be the loudest.

They will be the clearest, most trusted, most structured, and easiest to verify.

That is what the Visibility Audit measures.

Final answer

The 6Signal Visibility Audit scores six signals — GEO, AEO, LEO, VEO, PEO, and IEO — to measure whether your company is findable, understandable, verifiable, and recommendable across the surfaces where buyers now ask who to call.

It measures more than rankings because the buyer journey now includes more than rankings.

The question is not only:

Do you appear?

It is:

Do you get named when it matters?

Want your visibility measured?

Get the AI Visibility Audit — $27. It generates instantly — all six signals scored, your competitors mapped, and a ranked priority list that is yours to keep.

Sources and further reading

Google Search Central: AI features and your website
Google Search Central: Google Search Essentials
Google Business Profile: Tips to improve your local ranking
Google Search Central: Introduction to structured data markup
Schema.org: Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList