This chapter is the index to the guide's working material: the in-book checklists, the companion downloads, the interactive tools, and the reference tables that age fastest. It is organized by the workflow the book teaches, because a pile of templates sorted alphabetically helps nobody: discover prompts, baseline visibility, find sources and competitors, prioritize, implement, re-test, report.
One position up front: you can run this entire workflow with an API key and a spreadsheet. Commercial tools buy convenience and scale, not access to anything you cannot measure yourself.
The workflow, and where each checklist lives
Each in-book checklist lives inside its topical chapter, next to the reasoning that produced it, and this table is the map. Read the chapter before running its checklist; a checklist without its mechanism degrades into cargo cult within one team handoff.
| Workflow stage | Working material | Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| Discover prompts | Keyword-to-prompt conversion, buyer-journey prompt map, intent taxonomy | Prompt and Topic Research |
| Baseline visibility | Sampling protocol, metric definitions, confounder list | Measuring AI Search Visibility |
| Diagnose problems | The five-gate diagnostic and quick audit | Auditing and Diagnosing Visibility Problems |
| Find sources and competitors | Credited-source mapping, slot analysis, gap types | Competitive Analysis |
| Prioritize | Category scoring: concentration, persona sensitivity, memory-retrieval mix | Building Your AI Search Strategy |
| Implement: technical | Crawler access checklist and robots.txt directives | Technical Accessibility for AI Crawlers |
| Implement: content | Writing and citation-worthiness checklists | Writing for Retrieval and Citation |
| Re-test and report | Tracking system design, attribution setup | Building a Visibility Tracking System and Attribution and Business Impact |
| Run the sequence | The whole workflow as a 90-day schedule | The First 90 Days |
Companion downloads
The flagship download is the AI Search Visibility Audit and Tracking Workbook: one spreadsheet that executes the workflow above, from company setup and prompt inventory through raw response logs, mention and citation tracking, gap analysis, and the monthly dashboard. Spreadsheets win here because the work is rows: repeated prompts, repeated runs, competitors, citations, and scores.
The supporting downloads follow the same one-job-each rule: a prompt discovery workbook, industry prompt packs built from the study behind The Research Behind This Guide, a citation gap tracker, the GA4 channel group template with the AI referrer regex library, and report and scorecard templates for the cadence described in Running an AI Search Optimization Campaign.
Interactive tools
The interactive set covers the calculations that spreadsheets make tedious: a visibility checker, a keyword-to-prompt generator, a persona prompt generator, a sample-size calculator for deciding how many runs a measurement needs, a robots.txt checker against the current AI crawler roster, and an industry benchmark explorer over the study's per-industry concentration, persona-sensitivity, and volatility data.
The maintained reference tables
Some reference material goes stale in months, so it is maintained in one place each and dated. The AI crawler and user-agent directory lives in Where the Machines Get Their Data: Crawlers, Indexes, and Training Pipelines. The AI referrer list for analytics lives in Attribution and Business Impact. The platform comparison table lives in The AI Search Ecosystem. The metrics dictionary lives in Measuring AI Search Visibility, with short definitions repeated in the Glossary. This page carries the guide's changelog, so a returning reader can see what changed since their last visit without rereading anything.
The commercial tool directory
Commercial AI visibility tools cluster into a few jobs: prompt and mention tracking across models, citation and source analysis, competitive share-of-voice reporting, and crawler or log monitoring. The category is young and moving fast, so treat any specific feature claim, including the ones in this paragraph, as dated the day it is written. Free entry points exist for a first look, such as Ahrefs' AI visibility checker,Ahrefs' free AI visibility checker, a no-cost first look at brand presence in AI answers. and dedicated trackers such as Citations.io cover the monitoring job.Citations.io, representative of the dedicated AI citation-tracking category. Independent tested comparisons are more useful than any vendor's own positioning.Lumentir's tested comparison of AI visibility tools, one of the few roundups based on hands-on testing rather than feature lists.
Before buying anything, run the manual method for a month: log prompts, runs, and mentions in the workbook by hand. The practice is widely recommended as a starting point,TechRadar's walkthrough of manual AI visibility tracking, which documents the spreadsheet-based method. and it teaches you what a tool would need to do for you, which is the only defensible basis for choosing one. The evaluation criteria, including the sampling and model-coverage questions that decide whether a tool's numbers mean anything, are in Building a Visibility Tracking System.