What is AI Visibility?
AI visibility is how often, how prominently, and how favorably a brand shows up in AI-generated answers. It covers whether an assistant mentions you at all, where in the answer you appear, whether your site gets cited as a source, and what the answer actually says about you.
Why it is a separate metric from search rankings
A ranking is a position on a page of links. AI visibility is presence inside a synthesized answer, and the answer usually names only a handful of brands. You can rank well in Google and be invisible in ChatGPT, because assistants assemble answers from their training data and from the sources their retrieval layer trusts, not from your rankings.
How to measure it
- Mention rate: the share of relevant buyer questions where the assistant names you
- Position: whether you are the first recommendation or an afterthought
- Citation rate: how often your own domain is cited as evidence
- Sentiment and accuracy: what the answer claims about you, and whether it is right
Because answers change with every model update, AI visibility is a time series, not a one-off audit. Measuring it means asking the same buyer questions across models on a schedule and tracking the deltas.