AI Visibility
AI visibility measures how much your brand, product, or content is recognized and cited by generative AI models.
TL;DR
Key Definition
AI visibility represents your presence in the AI assistant ecosystem. It is measured by the frequency, position, and context of your mentions in responses generated by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others.
Why It Matters
- AI assistants are becoming a major discovery channel
- AI visibility directly impacts brand perception
- AI citations generate qualified traffic
- Low visibility means competitors are recommended instead of you
- AI visibility is becoming a measurable competitive advantage
How It Works
AI visibility depends on how language models were trained and how they access information in real-time.
Training Data
LLMs are trained on massive text corpora. If your brand was well-documented and cited before the cutoff date, you benefit from baseline visibility.
Real-time Search
Tools like Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews perform real-time web searches. Your current content directly impacts your visibility.
RAG and llms.txt Files
Retrieval-Augmented Generation allows AI to access your recent content. A well-structured llms.txt file facilitates this indexing.
How to Measure It
- Overall AI visibility score (0-100)
- Number of mentions per platform (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity)
- Average position in recommendations
- Share of voice vs competitors
- Mention sentiment (positive, neutral, negative)
- Citation rate by query category
Common Mistakes
- Not monitoring AI visibility at all
- Focusing only on ChatGPT while ignoring other platforms
- Confusing SEO visibility with AI visibility
- Ignoring mention context (being cited negatively counts too)
- Not benchmarking against competitors
Quick Checklist
Follow these steps to get started.
- Identify key queries where you should appear
- Test your visibility on ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity
- Document your current position as baseline
- Analyze visibility of your 3-5 main competitors
- Set up weekly mention tracking
- Create alerts for new mentions
- Analyze the sentiment of your mentions
Examples
Visibility Audit
A SaaS startup discovers it only appears in 2% of relevant responses, compared to 45% for its main competitor. It launches a targeted GEO program.
Continuous Monitoring
A marketing agency sets up a daily AI visibility tracking dashboard for its clients, enabling rapid interventions.