What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is your brand's presence in the answers AI assistants give. If someone asks "best CRM for a 10-person agency" and ChatGPT names three tools, those three have visibility for that question. Everyone else does not exist in that moment.
The five metrics
| Metric | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Mention rate | In what share of relevant prompts is the brand named? |
| Citation rate | How often does the answer link to the brand's own pages? |
| Position | Is the brand named first, or fifth in a list? |
| Sentiment | Is it described positively, neutrally or with caveats? |
| Share of voice | How do those numbers compare with named competitors? |
Why answers differ from rankings
Classic search shows ten links and lets the user choose. An AI answer chooses for them. Engines with live retrieval (Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Google AI Overviews) pull from pages they find for the query; models answering from training data lean on what was widely written about you. Either way, being discussed on trusted third-party sites weighs heavily.
Answers are not stable
The same prompt can return different brands on different days, in different countries, and for logged-in versus logged-out users. That is why trackers run each prompt repeatedly and report rates, not single results.
Frequently asked
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is how often and how favourably AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews mention or cite a brand when users ask questions in its category.
How is AI visibility measured?
By running a fixed set of realistic prompts against each AI engine on a schedule and recording brand mentions, linked citations, position in the answer, sentiment, and share of voice against competitors.
Is AI visibility the same as SEO?
They overlap. AI engines often draw on pages that already rank and on third-party sources such as reviews, forums and lists. Good SEO helps, but mentions on other trusted sites matter more than in classic search.