ZeroMention - AI Search Visibility Auditor

A command-line tool that audits a brand's visibility in AI search engines (AEO) and traditional SEO health. Built to answer the question: when potential customers ask AI assistants about your product category, does your brand show up?

Background

Traditional SEO tools tell you how you rank on Google. But as more consumers turn to AI assistants to discover products, a brand can have perfect SEO and still be invisible in AI search. This tool measures that gap.

The inspiration for this project came from discovering Petra Labs, a company helping businesses improve their visibility in AI search, and realizing a startup I'd been following could benefit from this kind of audit. I built this tool and ran a manual audit on them and found that despite offering a genuinely novel product, they had zero mentions across AI search responses for relevant consumer queries while established competitors dominated every result.

That gap between product quality and AI visibility is what this tool is built to surface. I'm not affiliated with Petra Labs in any way, and I've kept the audited startup anonymous out of respect for their team.

What it does

SEO Module

• Crawls every page on a site
• Checks for canonical tag misconfigurations
• Detects missing meta descriptions and title tags
• Identifies missing 404 pages
• Generates a markdown report

AEO Module

• Runs user-provided queries against an AI model (Grok)
• Checks whether your brand appears in the responses
• Tracks competitor share of voice
• Calculates a mention rate across all queries
• Generates a markdown report

Prerequisites

• Node.js v18 or higher
• An API key from any OpenAI-compatible provider e.g.:
  • Grok
  • OpenAI

Setup

1. Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/aeo-audit.git
cd aeo-audit

2. Install dependencies:

npm install

3. Create your .env file:

cp .env.example .env

4. Add your API key to .env. The tool uses Grok by default — add your key like this:

GROK_API_KEY=your_key_here

If you prefer OpenAI, update the apiKey and remove the baseURL override in aeo/tracker.ts, then set:

OPENAI_API_KEY=your_key_here

Usage

npm run audit -- --brand "YOUR BRAND" --url "https://yourbrand.com" --queries "query one,query two,query three" --competitors "competitor1,competitor2,competitor3"

Options

Flag	Alias	Required	Description
--brand	-b	yes	Brand name to audit
--url	-u	yes	Brand website URL
--queries	-q	yes	Comma separated list of queries a consumer might ask an AI
--competitors	-c	yes	Comma separated list of competitors to track in AI responses

Example

npm run audit -- \
  --brand "Chick-fil-A" \
  --url "https://www.chick-fil-a.com" \
  --queries "best fast food chicken sandwich,fast food restaurants with best customer service,healthy fast food options" \
  --competitors "mcdonalds,wendys,popeyes,raising canes,zaxbys"

Output

Reports are saved to the reports/ folder as markdown files:

• reports/seo-audit-YYYY-MM-DD.md
• reports/aeo-audit-YYYY-MM-DD.md

Project Structure

aeo-audit/
├── index.ts          # entry point, CLI argument parsing
├── seo/
│   ├── crawler.ts    # crawls site, audits each page
│   └── reporter.ts   # generates SEO markdown report
├── aeo/
│   ├── tracker.ts    # queries Grok, tracks brand mentions
│   └── reporter.ts   # generates AEO markdown report
└── reports/          # generated reports (gitignored)

Built With

This project was built with assistance from Claude (Anthropic).