What AI search visibility is and how it's measured
AI search visibility is how often AI answer engines name your brand and cite your pages when people ask about what you do. This page explains the terms the ranking uses, so its scores make sense.
From ten blue links to one answer
In classic search, people saw a list of pages and chose one. In ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, they read an answer. The engine reads pages for them, writes a reply, and may name brands and link sources along the way. If you are not in that reply, the reader may never reach your site.
AEO and GEO
AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are two names for the same work: making your site and your reputation easy for AI engines to find, understand, trust and quote. People tend to say AEO when they mean being the direct answer, and GEO when they mean appearing in generated answers more broadly. In practice the advice overlaps: let AI crawlers in, answer real questions plainly, structure pages so a machine can read them, keep facts current, and be mentioned on the sites engines already trust.
What gets measured
Mentions
Whether an answer names your brand. Tools usually report a mention rate: of the answers they read for your questions, the share that named you.
Citations
Whether an answer links to one of your pages as a source, and which page. A brand can be mentioned without being cited, and a page can be cited without the brand being named. Both matter: mentions shape what readers think, citations can send them to you.
Share of voice
Your mentions or citations as a share of all the brands named across the same set of questions. It tells you how you compare with competitors, not just whether you appear.
Position and sentiment
Some tools also record where in the answer you appear and whether the description is positive, neutral or negative.
Crawlers and AI referrals
On your own site, you can see AI crawlers and agents fetching pages, and visits that arrive from links in AI answers. This is the only part of AI visibility that comes from real traffic rather than sampled answers.
How tools measure it
- You choose a set of prompts: the questions your buyers ask.
- The tool asks each engine those prompts on a schedule, often daily, sometimes through the consumer app and sometimes through the API.
- It reads every answer, records mentions and cited URLs, and compares you with the competitors you name.
- It turns that into rates, share of voice and trends, and the better tools let you open the answers behind every number.
That is why the ranking scores citation tracking, engines covered and evidence quality separately: a tool can ask the right questions on too few engines, or report a number you can't trace back to an answer.
What a tool can't measure
- What real people were shown. Answers vary by person, location, history and time. A tool sees its own samples, not everyone's.
- How many people ask a question. AI engines don't publish prompt volumes. Any "volume" figure is an estimate; ask the vendor how it is made.
- Why an answer changed. Engines change models and sources without notice. A tool can show that you moved, not prove what moved you.
- Revenue on its own. Tying AI visibility to sign-ups needs data from your own site: AI referral visits, crawler activity and conversions.
What helps you get cited
- Let AI crawlers read your site: check robots.txt and your firewall rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended.
- Answer the questions buyers ask on pages that say the answer plainly near the top.
- Publish facts a machine can check: prices, specs, comparisons and structured data, kept current.
- Give engines a map: a sitemap and an llms.txt that lists your main pages.
- Be mentioned where engines already look: reviews, communities and the publications in your space.
Tools differ most in how much of this they do for you. Some report; some recommend; a few make the change. See the actionability criterion, or go straight to which tool fits you.