Our AI visibility audit is free now. Here's what's still worth paying for.

From today, the Heralded Snapshot is free. It started as the AI visibility audit I did by hand for GrowthPath AI clients. It now asks six AI engines your buyers’ questions, reads the sources behind every answer and checks your own pages, in about ten minutes.

If you lead marketing at a B2B tech company and you’ve been wondering whether to hire someone for AI visibility, that changes what you should pay for. The diagnosis should cost you nothing. The work is where the money should go.

Version zero was client work, done by hand

GrowthPath started doing AI visibility work early this year, for the companies I was already consulting for. Their buyers had started asking ChatGPT for a shortlist before talking to any vendor, and nobody on the marketing team could say whether they were on it.

So I checked, by hand. I wrote the questions a buyer in their category would ask, put them to each engine, saved the answers, followed the sources the engines cited and wrote up what to change. Reading hundreds of AI answers is exactly as fun as it sounds. If I was fast, it would take about three hours to do a report.

The work was useful, and it had an obvious commercial problem. Most of the hours went into reading, and nobody was paying for the reading. Clients paid for the last two pages: what’s wrong, and what to do first. The report also stopped right where the hard part began. Finding out that a competitor’s comparison page is doing your positioning for you is useful. Getting your company onto that page is the job.

Version one automated the reading

So I automated the part nobody paid for. A script asked the questions and collected the answers and sources. I kept the judgement: what the results meant for this company, what to fix and in what order. Client time moved from gathering evidence to acting on it.

It stayed inside GrowthPath. By April it had a name and a page on the GrowthPath site, and it did two jobs. It gave our clients their starting point, and it gave new companies a reason to talk to us.

Version two went public, kind of

In June we launched it properly. The lite scan was fully automated and free, and the full report, which still had some manual parts, cost €149. It was still a GrowthPath tool, sold next to our services, for companies that wanted to see where they stood before hiring anyone.

We tested it on 50+ brands before launch. The biggest learning was that for most B2B companies, most of what AI says about them comes from sites they don’t own. So fixing it is rarely a website project alone. A good part of the work happens on the review sites, comparison pages and articles the engines already trust.

Version three became a product

By August we had a choice. Keep the scan as a GrowthPath automation, or build it into a product. We chose the product.

An automation only reaches the clients we already have, one engagement at a time, and it improves only as fast as we use it. A product reaches any team that has the problem, including teams that want to do the work themselves. Every company that runs it shows us where it’s thin, so it improves faster than any one engagement could push it. And our clients stop depending on us to see their own numbers.

So it got its own name, Heralded, by GrowthPath AI. This is where the bigger dreams kicked in. We wanted something that goes past the report and fixes your AI visibility for you. That launches on 6 October. It reads the engines daily, turns what it finds into actions, and agents do the work while you approve what ships.

But back to the Snapshot.

Version four is free

Today is the day the Snapshot becomes free.

It asks six engines twenty buyer questions, twice each, reads the pages they cite one by one, checks up to 150 pages of your own site and scores you against your competitors. It does about 20x more work than I could do by hand in version zero (and better) and it’s free and done in 10 minutes, instead of costing €149 and 3 hours of my life.

How? Technology we adopted recently made each Snapshot cheap enough to run that we can cover it. The details are in the post on the Heralded blog (opens in a new tab).

We could have kept charging. But a paid diagnosis puts a price on the question “do we even have a problem?”, and a lot of teams stop there. Or they pay an agency thousands for a one-off audit, which is an expensive way to find out whether to spend money. We’d rather start the conversation from your data than from a pitch.

What this means if you’re looking for help

Start with the Snapshot. It tells you whether the engines name you when buyers ask, who they name instead, and which sources put them there. If you’re in good shape, you’ve saved yourself a project.

If you’re not, be careful what you pay for next. When someone quotes you for an audit that ends in a report, ask what it tells you that the free Snapshot doesn’t. What’s worth paying for is the work a report can’t do:

• deciding what you should be known for, so the engines have one clear story to repeat
• building and fixing the pages that answer your buyers’ questions
• getting your company onto the review sites, comparison pages and articles the engines cite
• measuring whether any of it moved the answers

The Position Sprint (opens in a new tab) settles what you should be known for, starting from how the engines describe you today. GrowthPath’s Marketing Systems build and run the work that follows: AI visibility done for you on Heralded, a website built around your positioning, and a content engine.

If you’d rather have agents do the AI visibility work, that’s what Heralded is for. (stay tuned!)

What stayed the same

The questions are the ones I was answering by hand at the start. Are you on the shortlist? Who is on it instead? Which sources put them there? What should you change first?

The Snapshot now answers the first three for free. The fourth is where the work starts, and that’s where you should start paying.

Run your free Snapshot (opens in a new tab), or book a call if you’d rather go through it together.