How the AI visibility score works

What AI visibility means for your business

AI visibility is how often AI engines name your company when a buyer asks them who to consider in your category, and whether they cite your own pages when they do. The engines are ChatGPT with web search, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Google AI Overviews. A buyer types a question such as "best incident management software for engineering teams"; the engine answers with 3 to 6 companies, a sentence on each and the sources it trusted. Your visibility is your share of those answers, weighted by where you appear in the list and by whether the engine quoted your site or someone else's. Every score comes from recorded answers: the check puts 15 such questions to all four engines and keeps every reply. A score of 60 or more means you are named in most answers and cited in some; below 25 means the engines rarely mention you when it matters.

A large share of buying research now starts as a question to an AI assistant. The answer is a short list of 3 to 6 companies with a sentence on each, and the buyer rarely looks past it. If you are not on that list, you are not in the running, whatever your Google ranking says.

Engines build that list from what they can read and what they trust: your own pages, if their crawlers are allowed in and the pages say plainly what you do, and third-party sources such as review sites, directories, comparison articles and forums. AI visibility is the measurable result of both, and the report shows which half is holding you back.

Two scores, two numbers

The headline is measured visibility alone: how prominently the engines named you across the recorded answers. Site readiness is a second number in its own section, out of 100, and is never folded into the first. They are kept apart because they fail for opposite reasons. Visibility is what the engines say about you and is fixed by getting written about; readiness is whether they can read you and is fixed on your own site in an afternoon. The same number appears on the report page, the PDF, the email subject and the proposal, so nothing you are sent disagrees with anything you open.

Two questions ask about you by name

Every run carries two questions a buyer types when checking on a company: its reviews, and whether it is good for one of the things it sells. They count toward the score like any other answer, so a company the engines know at all starts from what those two earn, and they can never be a lost question, since the engine was told the name. Two more questions name the place a buyer would search in, the market city or the country. The rest are the category, the products and the rivals, and they are where the score is won.

Where the questions come from

From your website, not from a category typed into a form. We read the site, work out what you sell, to whom and where, and write about fifteen questions a buyer would ask an engine. They fall into four buckets: product questions (35%), niche questions (25%), head-term questions (20%) and comparisons with the names buyers already know (20%). The set is pinned, so a rescan asks the same questions and the score is comparable.

What counts as being named

Each question goes to each engine, and every answer is scored between 0 and 1:

• Not named: 0.
• Named, no position in a list: 0.50.
• Named at position r in a list: 0.50 plus 0.50 times 1/r, so first place is 1.0 and fourth is about 0.63.
• Your own domain cited as a source: another 0.15, capped at 1.0.
• Multiplied by sentiment: positive 1.0, neutral 0.9, negative 0.6.

Visibility is the average over every answer that was actually served, times 100. An engine that errored on a question is left out of the average rather than scored zero; a provider outage is not the same as being invisible.

Why an engine can show n/a

If an engine answered fewer than three of the questions, it is not scored: a number from one or two answers would be noise dressed as a measurement. Google AI Overviews is the usual case, because Google simply does not show an overview for many buying questions. The report says n/a and the other engines carry the score.

The thirteen site checks

Site readiness is the weighted share of passed checks, out of 100. The crawler check is worth six times the canonical check because a site-wide block undoes everything else on the list. Three of the checks have free single-check tools on this site.

What the score does not measure

• Sales or traffic. It measures what engines say, which comes before both.
• Sentiment of your buyers. It measures the sentiment of the engines' words about you, which is a different thing.
• Anything outside the questions asked. Fifteen questions across four engines is a sample, and the report says how big.
• Tomorrow. Engines change; the report is dated and rescans are how you watch the number move.

Reading your report

Page one is the pitch: the score, the per-engine numbers, the thirteen checks, share of voice against the brands the engines named, the exact questions a competitor took, the sources the engines trusted, and five fixes in order. Page two is the diagnostics: which engine names whom, why the top rivals get named, and what each engine says about you. The sample report walks through both pages.

Questions about the score