Brand recall
Share of relevant queries in which an AI engine mentions the audited brand by name. The most fundamental metric — if you are not named, nothing else matters.
Pillar · AI visibility
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is how often and how favourably a brand is mentioned in answers from generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. It is the AI equivalent of a search ranking — but instead of links on a results page, it measures whether the brand is named, recommended or cited inside the model's natural-language response.
The canonical definition
AI visibility = the share of relevant generative-AI responses in which a brand is mentioned by name, weighted by sentiment and by the position of the mention. A brand has high AI visibility when it is named early, with positive framing, on the buyer-intent questions that matter for its category.
Why AI visibility matters now
ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are quickly becoming the entry point of buyer research, especially for the questions that used to start a Google session.
When a buyer asks 'best CRM for a small agency', the brands the AI names get the consideration; the brands it omits get skipped — without ever being aware they were in the running.
Generative answers compress 10 search results into one paragraph, so the cost of being omitted is much higher than being on page two of Google.
Most brands have spent a decade tuning for SEO. Almost none have explicit feedback on whether AI engines mention them, with what sentiment, and against which competitors. AI visibility closes that blind spot.
How AI visibility is measured
Three core metrics, all derived from running the same set of buyer-intent questions across each AI engine and parsing the responses.
Share of voice (SoV)
Proportion of mentions that go to the audited brand vs. its competitors on a given set of queries. Tells you not just whether you are visible, but how visible relative to the competitive set.
Citation sentiment
Whether the AI engine talks about the brand positively, neutrally or negatively, and on which attributes. A brand can have high recall but poor sentiment — frequently mentioned, always with caveats.
AI visibility is not SEO
AI visibility lives one step earlier in the funnel than SEO: it is whether the brand is even in the consideration set the AI engine offers the buyer. SEO determines which links the buyer chooses to click after that. The two are complementary, not interchangeable — see the GEO vs SEO comparison.
How to improve AI visibility
There is no algorithmic gaming move; AI engines reward content that is easy to verify, easy to cite and clearly attributed.
Explicit factual phrasing
State concrete facts the model can lift directly into an answer (numbers, year founded, supported integrations, geographies covered). Vague benefit copy is invisible.
Schema.org structured data
Organization, Product, FAQPage, BlogPosting and BreadcrumbList markup gives engines a cheap way to extract the brand entity. Most CMS plugins emit this — verify your site actually serves it.
Presence on cited third-party sources
Generative engines re-cite Wikipedia, industry directories, comparison sites and review platforms when grounding. Being present on those pages, with accurate descriptions, is high leverage.
Brand entity disambiguation
Engines need to know which 'Acme' you are. A clear About page, consistent NAP (name, address, phone) and a concise canonical description are what they latch onto.