Definition
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is whether AI assistants name, cite and recommend your brand when someone asks a question that leads to a purchase. Three distinct states, measured per engine, on a fixed set of questions.
The three states
| State | Definition | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Mentioned | Your brand name appears in the answer text. | The weakest state. An answer can name you while pointing the buyer elsewhere. |
| Cited | The assistant used a page you own as a source for its answer. | Your content is inside the reasoning, not just the output. The most directly influenceable state. |
| Recommended | The answer actually advances you as a choice. | The state closest to a buying decision. Being shortlisted is not this. |
A fourth state matters as much as the three above: absent while a competitor is named. That is not a low score, it is a different situation, and it is where the sharpest commercial findings usually sit.
How it differs from SEO
Search results give a person ten options and let them choose. An assistant gives an answer. When the answer names three vendors, the other seven were not outranked — they were not in the conversation. The inputs overlap heavily with SEO (content, citations, third-party coverage), but the outcome being measured is different: presence in a synthesised answer, not position in a list.
How it differs from brand mention tracking
Mention tracking counts appearances. AI visibility, done usefully, asks which questions you appear for. Two hundred mentions across informational queries and zero on "which X should I buy" is a bad position that a mention count reports as a good one.
How it is measured
- Fix a question set. Buying questions in the buyer's own words, frozen and versioned so later runs are comparable.
- Run it on each engine separately. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity ground answers differently and disagree often. Averaging them destroys the finding.
- Repeat. One run is one sample.
- Record per run: named, cited, recommended, which competitors, which sources, and whether the call succeeded at all.
- Exclude failures from denominators. A provider error is not evidence of absence.
- Keep the raw answers. When a detection rule improves, the history is re-scored rather than re-purchased.
Terms you will see used for roughly this
Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) both describe the work of improving this position. "AI visibility" and "AI search monitoring" usually describe measuring it. The vocabulary is not settled, and anyone claiming a strict industry definition is inventing one.
Common questions
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is whether AI assistants name, cite and recommend your brand when someone asks a question that leads to a purchase. It has three distinct states — mentioned, cited, recommended — and they need different responses.
Is AI visibility the same as SEO?
No. SEO asks whether you rank on a results page a person then chooses from. AI visibility asks whether an assistant puts you into an answer the person may accept without clicking anything. Related inputs, different outcome.
How is AI visibility measured?
By sending a fixed set of buyer questions to each AI engine, repeatedly, and recording per engine whether the brand was named, whether one of its pages was cited, whether it was recommended, and which competitors appeared instead.
What we actually measure
Every result comes from the official OpenAI, Google Gemini
and Perplexity APIs with web search or grounding enabled. In our data those
surfaces are recorded as openai_api_web_search,
gemini_api_google_search and perplexity_api_sonar, and reports name
them explicitly.
That is not the same thing as a logged-in person using the ChatGPT app. These are official interfaces with web search on, but they are measurement surfaces rather than consumer sessions: no personalisation, no memory, no app-only features. Results can differ from what any individual user sees, and we do not claim the two are identical. We would rather put that on the pricing page than in the small print.
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