AI search visibility
How to measure something that sends you no traffic.
Every vendor in this category sells a visibility score and almost none of them say how it is calculated, which makes the number impossible to check and useless to compare. Ours is below, in full.
What is AI search visibility, and how is it measured?
AI search visibility is how often an AI assistant names your business when someone asks a question you should be the answer to. Because a generated answer produces no ranking, no impressions and usually no click, it cannot be measured by traffic — it is measured by asking a fixed set of prompts on each engine and recording three things: whether you were named, whether a page of yours was cited, and where in the answer you appeared. Those three combine into a single 0–100 score.
Why analytics shows zero
Four reasons your existing tools can't see this.
No referrer
An assistant that recommends you in conversation sends no visit at all. The recommendation happened; your analytics recorded nothing. Some AI products do pass a referrer on the minority of answers that get clicked, which is why AI traffic looks tiny even when AI influence is large.
No position to track
There is no result three in a generated answer. You are named or you are not, and rank-tracking software has nothing to report because there is no ranking to report on.
No impressions
Search Console counts impressions for the ten blue links, not for the answer above them. A query you dominate in AI answers can show zero impressions in the tool most teams treat as ground truth.
Answers are not reproducible
The same prompt returns different answers to different people and at different times. Any single check is an anecdote; only a rate across a fixed prompt set, repeated, is a measurement.
The arithmetic
Our score, in full.
Three components over the same denominator: the total number of prompt × engine checks. Nothing else feeds it.
score = 100 × ( 0.5 × mentionRate + 0.3 × citationRate + 0.2 × positionFactor )Mention rate
×0.5The share of prompt × engine checks in which your brand name appeared in the answer.
Weighted highest because being named is the whole outcome. A customer reading a recommendation has already been influenced whether or not they click.
Citation rate
×0.3The share of checks in which one of your pages was listed as a source the engine used.
Weighted second because it is the leading indicator: citations usually move before mentions do, and they identify exactly which page earned the reference.
Position factor
×0.2How prominently you appear when you are named — first business mentioned, second, third — averaged across all checks.
Weighted lowest because the gap between being named first and named third is real but far smaller than the gap between being named and being absent.
Position credit
Being named first is worth full credit. The decay is gentle at the top and flattens into a floor rather than falling away, because appearing sixth is still appearing.
| Named | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Credit | 1.00 | 0.85 | 0.70 | 0.55 | 0.40 | 0.25 |
Worked example
Run the numbers yourself.
20 prompts × 4 engines = 80 checks. Named in 24 of them, cited in 12, and where named, mostly second or third.
- Mention rate
- 24 ÷ 800.30
- Citation rate
- 12 ÷ 800.15
- Position factor
- sum of position credit ÷ 800.21
100 × (0.5 × 0.30 + 0.3 × 0.15 + 0.2 × 0.21)
24out of 100
A score of 24 means you are named in roughly a third of the questions you should own, cited half as often as that, and usually not first when you do appear. It is a starting position, not a failure — most businesses that have never done this work score in the teens or twenties.
We don't publish benchmark averages
You will find pages claiming that the average business scores 18, or that above 40 is good. We have not run enough measured engagements to say that honestly, and a benchmark invented to make a number feel meaningful is exactly the sort of unfalsifiable claim this page exists to argue against. What matters is your own score moving against your own locked prompt set — that comparison is valid from the first round.
FAQ
Measurement questions.
- What is AI search visibility?
- How often AI assistants name your business when answering questions your buyers ask. It is measured as a rate across a fixed set of prompts on each engine, not as a ranking, because generated answers have no positions to rank in.
- How is an AI visibility score calculated?
- Ours is 100 × (0.5 × mention rate + 0.3 × citation rate + 0.2 × position factor), where each rate is over the total number of prompt × engine checks. Position credit decays from 1.0 for first mention to 0.25 beyond fifth. Other vendors weight these differently, and most do not publish their formula at all — so scores are not comparable between tools.
- Can I measure AI visibility in Google Analytics or Search Console?
- No. A generated answer usually produces no click and therefore no referrer, and Search Console counts impressions for the link results rather than the answer above them. A query you dominate in AI answers can show zero impressions in both tools.
- How many prompts do I need for the score to mean anything?
- Ten to twenty prompts across four engines — 40 to 80 checks — is enough for the rate to be stable between rounds. Below about ten prompts a single answer changing swings the score enough to be misleading.
- Is a visibility score comparable between tools?
- No, and treating it as if it were is the most common mistake here. Different tools use different prompt sets, different engines, different position weighting and different definitions of a mention. Compare your score against your own previous score, never against a number from another platform.
- What is a good AI visibility score?
- The only honest answer is: higher than your last one, on the same prompt set. We do not publish a benchmark average because we have not measured enough engagements to state one truthfully, and a made-up threshold would make the number feel more meaningful than it is.
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