What is AI visibility?

AI visibility is a measure of whether AI answer engines mention, recommend, and cite your brand when someone asks a question in your category — and how you compare with competitors on the same questions.

Why it matters

Rankings tell you where a page sits on a results page. They say nothing about whether an AI engine names you when a buyer asks it for a recommendation, which is increasingly where category research starts. A brand can rank well and still never be mentioned, because the engine is drawing on sources that discuss the category rather than pages optimised for a keyword.

How it works in practice

Measuring it means running a fixed set of category questions against each engine on a schedule and recording what comes back: whether the brand is named, whether it is cited with a link, its position relative to competitors, and which sources the engine drew on. A single run is close to meaningless — engines are non-deterministic, and the same question can produce a different answer minutes apart — so the signal is in the trend across repeated runs.

The useful output is comparative, not absolute. Knowing you were named in 3 of 20 answers matters far less than knowing a competitor was named in 14 of the same 20, and knowing which sources the engine cited for them. That gap is the actionable part: it names the specific pages and publications that are shaping the answer.

Coverage varies by engine and changes without notice. Some expose citations directly, some ground answers in live search and some in training data, and access to each is governed by different crawler directives. Any figure that averages across engines without naming them is hiding more than it reports.

Also called: AI search visibility, LLM visibility, share of AI voice.