AI Visibility

AI VisibilityAI Visibility describes whether and how visible a brand, website or person is in AI-generated answers. It measures mention, position, description and source linking across multiple platforms and prompts.Open glossary entry → (German: KI-Sichtbarkeit) describes a brand's presence in answers from systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI OverviewsAI Overviews are AI-generated answer boxes from Google that appear above the classic search results. They summarize information from the web and can change click distribution.Open glossary entry →. Unlike classic rankings, users do not see a list of results but a summarized answer in which brands may appear or be absent.

Key questions are:

• Is the brand mentioned?
• Is it mentioned early?
• Is it described correctly and positively?
• Is the brand's own website linked as a source?
• Are competitors mentioned more often?

AI answers are not fully deterministic. They can vary by platform, model, prompt, language, location and time. A reliable measurement therefore needs fixed prompt sets, repeated queries and comparisons over time. AI Visibility is a measurable probability, not a guaranteed placement.

How AI visibility is measured #

Unlike rankings, there is no public results pageThe Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the page a search engine returns after a query. Besides the organic listings it often contains extra elements such as ads, featured snippets or AI Overviews.Open glossary entry → to scrape. AI visibility is measured by running a representative set of prompts against assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity and analyzing the answers: is the brand mentioned, how prominently, in what toneSentiment describes the tone in which a brand is portrayed in AI answers, for example positive, neutral, mixed, negative or uncertain. It measures the quality of a mention, not just its presence.Open glossary entry →, and is it cited as a source? Tracked over time, this yields mention rates, share of voiceShare of Voice in AI answers measures the proportion of mentions a brand receives within a prompt set compared to competitors. It indicates the competitive position in AI answers.Open glossary entry → and sentiment per topic.

Why it differs from classic SEO #

Assistants compress many sources into one answer and typically name only a few options — visibility is winner-takes-most. Content wins by being crawlableCrawling is the process by which a search engine bot fetches a URL and downloads its content. It is the first step before a page can be indexed.Open glossary entry → for AI botsAI crawlers are automated bots that fetch web pages for AI providers in order to find content, make it available for search functions, retrieve it for answers, or, depending on the provider, use it for model training.Open glossary entry →, factually dense, well-structured and consistently described across the web, not by keywordA keyword is the search term users enter into a search engine to find information, products or providers. Keywords are the basis against which rankings and visibility are measured.Open glossary entry → placement alone.