AI visibility

What is AI visibility?

AI visibility is a measure of how often, and how prominently, AI assistants mention your brand or cite your website when people ask them questions. It covers answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, plus AI features inside search engines, such as Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.

It has two parts that are worth keeping apart. A **mention** is when the answer names your brand, product or person. A **citation** is when the answer links to a page on your site as a source. You can be mentioned without being cited (the model knows you, but sourced the answer elsewhere), and cited without being mentioned (your page supplied a fact, but the answer recommends someone else). Both matter, for different reasons.

AI visibility is not one number in one place. Answers change from run to run, differ between models, and depend on whether the assistant searched the web or answered from what it learned in training. With web search on, the assistant runs searches, reads pages and cites some of them, so your organic rankings and your content both feed into it. Without search, the answer comes from training data, which reflects what was written about you across the web up to the model’s cut-off date.

Because answers vary, you measure AI visibility the way you would measure a poll, not a fixed ranking: you ask a fixed set of questions (prompts) repeatedly, across several models, and look at rates over time. The usual measures are mention rate (share of answers that name you), citation rate (share of answers that link to you), citation position (where your link appears among the sources) and share of voice against competitors.

Why AI visibility matters for SEO

People now ask AI assistants many of the questions they used to type into a search box: “what is the best CRM for a small agency”, “how do I fix a leaking tap”, “which plumbers in Leeds open on Sunday”. When the answer names three companies and links to four pages, the brands and pages left out lose that moment, even if they rank well in classic results.

AI visibility also overlaps with ordinary SEO more than the hype suggests. Google says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and other assistants with web search rely on search results too. Pages that rank, answer the question clearly and are trusted by other sites tend to be the ones cited. Measuring AI visibility tells you whether that work is reaching the answers, and which competitors and sources the models prefer instead.

It is also a check on accuracy. Assistants sometimes describe a brand with out-of-date prices, features that no longer exist or a competitor’s details. You can’t edit an AI answer directly, but you can only fix what you have seen.

How to measure AI visibility

1. Write 20-50 prompts that a real customer would ask, across the funnel: problem questions (“how do I…”), category questions (“best X for Y”) and comparison questions (“X vs Y”). Keep most prompts unbranded, because a prompt that names you will mention you by definition.
2. Run each prompt on the assistants your audience uses, with web search turned on, so the answers cite sources the way users see them.
3. Record for each answer: whether your brand is mentioned, whether your site is cited, the position of your citation and which competitors and third-party pages are cited instead.
4. Repeat on a schedule, with the same prompts and models, and compare rates rather than single answers. One answer is an anecdote; fifty runs show a trend.
5. Study the pages that are cited for prompts you miss. They show the format, depth and sources the models favour, and often point to content gaps or to third-party sites (reviews, lists, forums) where your brand is absent.
6. Act on what you find with ordinary SEO and PR: improve the pages that should be cited, earn coverage on the sites that are cited, and correct wrong facts at their source.

AI visibility example

Prompt: “best open-source rank tracker”. Run 10 times on each of four assistants (40 answers). Your brand is named in 14 answers (35% mention rate) and your site is cited in 9 (22.5% citation rate), usually as the third or fourth source. A competitor is named in 30 answers, and the most cited page overall is a third-party comparison article that doesn’t list you. That article is your first outreach target.