What Is AI Visibility?
How It Is Measured, and What You Can Fix

What AI visibility means

A search engine shows ten links; an AI engine writes one answer and names a few brands in it, sometimes with links to its sources. Being visible there has four parts, and a brand can be strong on one and missing on another:

• Mention: whether the answer names you at all, when the question is about your category rather than your name.
• Accuracy: whether what it says is true: your price, your founding year, where you are, what you do.
• Sentiment: the tone of the answer about you.
• Citation: whether the sources it links include your pages.

Each engine finds and cites pages its own way, so visibility on one is not visibility on the rest. OpenAI says ChatGPT search “typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries” before it searches (OpenAI help center), so the question a buyer types is not the query that retrieved anyone's page.

How AI visibility is measured

Most tools turn the four parts into a 0–100 score. This is how ours is built, from the same code that scores every audit:

• Mention Rate (40%): the share of answers that name your brand. Each prompt asked on each platform is one answer: 20 prompts on 6 platforms is 120 answers, and if 18 of them name you, your mention rate is 15%.
• Accuracy (30%): starts at 100 and drops with each statement AI gets wrong against the facts in your brand profile, weighted by how serious the worst error is and how often errors occur. With no facts on file there is nothing to check, and it stays at 100.
• Sentiment (15%): the tone of the answers, from 0 (negative) through 50 (neutral) to 100 (positive), averaged over every answer.
• Citation Rate (15%): for each answer, the share of its links that point to your site, averaged over every answer; an answer with no links counts as 0. Every platform can cite sources when it searches, ChatGPT and Claude included; an answer given from memory cites nothing.

That weighted average is then multiplied by 0.2 + 0.8 × coverage, where coverage is the market-weighted share of the platforms in your audit that mentioned you at least once. The weights are ChatGPT 36%, Google AI Overviews 18%, Perplexity 18%, Google AI Mode 10%, Gemini 9% and Claude 9%. A brand no engine names scores 0, whatever its accuracy or sentiment. Our AI visibility score lesson works through examples and compares how other tools calculate theirs.

Any score is a sample. It covers the prompts asked, on the engines asked, on the day asked; answers vary from one run to the next. Google says “Third-party tools don't have access to our internal ranking data” (Search Central, updated June 5, 2026), so no tool can show you a verified rank inside an AI answer.

How AI visibility tools work

An AI visibility tool asks the engines your buyers' questions and reads the answers. The differences between tools are in the details:

• Which engines, and how they are asked. Through an API with web search on, by reading the app, or from Google's results page. An answer from memory shows what the model already knows; an answer with search shows what it finds today.
• Whose prompts. Yours, ones the tool suggests from your site, or ones drawn from searches people run.
• What is read. Mentions and links in all of them; some also check the answers against your facts, check whether AI crawlers can reach your site, or count the visits AI assistants send you.
• How often. One check is a snapshot. Asking the same prompts on a schedule is AI visibility tracking.

Our audit asks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude on paid plans and ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews on Free. To try one without an account, use the free AI visibility tool; to weigh paid tools, read the best AI visibility tools compared.

AI visibility optimization: what you can actually fix

Most advice sold as AI visibility optimization adds something: markup, a page format, a way of writing. A July 2026 survey of 45 GEO studies found that “no reviewed technique shows a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on organic discoverability” (arXiv:2607.14035), and Google says there is “no special schema.org markup you need to add” for its AI features (Google's AI optimization guide, updated July 10, 2026). The fixes with a documented consequence remove a block instead:

1. Let the search crawlers in. OpenAI states that “sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”, and each of its bot settings is independent of the others (OpenAI's crawler docs). Blocking a training crawler and allowing a search one is a choice you can make per bot.
2. Check the firewall, not only robots.txt. OpenAI's help center also asks you to “confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses”. A firewall can refuse a crawler that robots.txt allows, and robots.txt alone will not show it.
3. Remove controls that hide your text. Google's AI features need a page that is “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet” (Google's AI features page), and its robots meta tag documentation says nosnippet also prevents content being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. A stray noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet:0 or data-nosnippet takes the page out.
4. Correct the wrong facts where engines read them. When an engine quotes last year's price, put the current one in plain text on your pricing page and update every other page that states one. An engine answering from memory will not see the change until its vendor ships a newer model; one that searches can.
5. Be named where engines already look. When an engine cites other sites for your category instead of yours, being named on those sites is the route into the answer. The evidence shows an association, not a guaranteed effect, so treat it as outreach, not a lever.

Our audit runs the first three on every plan: robots.txt for 18 AI crawlers, a request as each of the 16 that fetch pages, and a scan for those snippet controls. It checks every answer against the facts you enter for the fourth and, from Starter, lists the sites that cite competitors and not you for the fifth. Each finding becomes a ranked fix with a priority and an effort estimate. The free AI crawler checker runs the access check on one page with no account.

AI visibility and AI visibility tracking

This page is about the thing itself. The AI visibility tracker page is about measuring it over time: the same prompts on all 6 engines, on demand or on a schedule, with every run compared with the last. Tracking tells you where you stand; the fixes above are what move it.