Glossary
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is how often and how favourably a brand appears in answers from AI assistants and AI search: whether it's mentioned, cited with a link, recommended, and described correctly. It's measured by running a fixed set of buyer prompts across engines over time, since there's no equivalent of a ranking report.
What to measure
| Metric | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Mention rate | In what share of prompts is the brand named? |
| Citation rate | How often is our site linked as a source? |
| Recommendation rate | How often is it suggested as an option? |
| Position | First, middle or last among options? |
| Accuracy | Are the facts about us correct? |
| Share of voice | Our mentions vs competitors' |
| Sources | Which pages did the engine cite? |
How to measure it
- Write 20 to 100 prompts your buyers would ask: "best tool for...", "X vs Y", "how do I...".
- Run them in the engines your buyers use, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Google AI Overviews.
- Record mentions, citations, position and sources.
- Repeat on a schedule; answers vary between runs, so look at trends over weeks.
Tools automate this, but a spreadsheet works to start.
What moves it
The same things as GEO: rank for the underlying searches, write answer-first pages with sources and numbers, keep facts consistent, and get mentioned on the pages AI engines retrieve for your category, which are often directories, review sites, comparisons and community threads. In AI answers about software, those third-party lists are frequently the cited sources.
Analytics
Referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and similar shows up in analytics. It's still a small share of traffic for most sites, but it tends to convert well because the visitor arrives with a recommendation.
Example
A founder tracks 30 prompts monthly. In month one, her product appears in 2 answers. After listing on the review sites and directories that engines kept citing for competitors, it appears in 11 by month four, and ChatGPT referrals show up in analytics for the first time.
FAQ
How do I check if ChatGPT mentions my product?
Ask it the questions your buyers would ask, several times and in several engines, and record the results over time.
Why do AI answers about my product change?
Answers are generated fresh, and retrieval results change. That's why you measure trends across many runs.
Can I see AI visibility in Google Search Console?
AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is included in Search Console's Performance report, but not broken out as a separate visibility metric.
Sources
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website
- Aggarwal et al.: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv)