Guide · AI visibility
What is AI visibility, and how do you measure it?
AI visibility is the share of AI answers that name your brand when buyers ask about your category. This guide explains what it means, which numbers matter, how to check it yourself, and how to raise it.
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UGC Planner · 4 prompts × 7 engines
One run43%
Visibility: named in 12 of 28 answers
- Gemini4 of 4
- Google AI Mode3 of 4
- Perplexity2 of 4
- Grok0 of 4
Sample data
In short
AI visibility is how often AI assistants and AI search features name your brand when people ask about your category, usually measured as the share of answers that mention you. It is the AI-era counterpart to search rankings: if ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews don’t name you, many buyers never see you. Rankry measures it with the same prompts on every run across up to nine AI engines, so you can see the trend and what drives it.
Why it matters
Why does AI visibility matter?
Many buyers now start a purchase by asking an AI assistant instead of typing keywords into a search box. They ask for “the best deal tracker for UGC creators” or “a CRM for a five-person agency”, and the answer names a handful of brands. The brands in that short list get considered. The rest are not on the page at all.
That changes what being found means. In classic search, ranking eighth still puts you on page one. In an AI answer there is often no page one, just a paragraph or a short list with a few names. AI visibility tells you whether you are in that list, how high, and for which questions.
It also shapes how buyers see you before they reach your site. AI answers describe brands: who a product is for, what it costs, what it lacks. If that description is wrong or thin, you can lose deals you never knew were in play.
The metrics
How is AI visibility measured?
AI visibility is a family of numbers, not one score. These are the core metrics, with the plain question each one answers.
| Metric | What it measures | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | The share of answers (each prompt on each engine) that name your brand | Named in 12 of 28 answers = 43% |
| Position | Your average rank in the answers that name you; lower is better | Ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd = average #2 |
| Share of voice | Your mentions as a share of mentions of you plus the competitors you track | 42 of 185 tracked-brand mentions = 23% |
| Sentiment | Whether answers that name you describe you positively, neutrally or negatively | 8 of 12 answers read positive |
| Diversity | How many of the engines you track name you at all | Named by 6 of 7 engines |
| Citations | Which pages and domains the AI lists as sources, and whether yours are among them | ugcplanner.com cited in 4 answers |
Sample data: made-up numbers for an example brand.
Try it yourself
How do I check my AI visibility for free?
You can get a first read in about an hour with nothing but the AI assistants themselves. Keep the method identical each time so results stay comparable.
- 01
Write 10 buyer questions
Phrase them the way a buyer would ask an assistant, without your brand name: “best invoicing app for freelancers in the UK”, “alternatives to Notion for tracking brand deals”. Mix short queries with full questions.
- 02
Pick the engines
Use the assistants your buyers use. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode cover a lot of people; add Claude and Grok if your audience uses them.
- 03
Ask in a clean session
Log out or use a private window, and turn off memory or personalization where you can. Otherwise past chats can tilt answers toward brands you have discussed before.
- 04
Record four things
For each answer, note whether you were named, at what position, which competitors were named and which sources were cited. A sheet with one row per question and engine works.
- 05
Compute the numbers
Visibility is answers that name you divided by all answers. Position is your average rank where named. Do the same for each competitor to see who leads.
- 06
Repeat on a schedule
Ask the same questions again next week. AI answers vary between runs, so a single check is a sample, not a verdict. Trends over several runs are what you can act on.
Benchmarks
What is a good AI visibility score?
There is no universal good score, because visibility depends on the prompts you choose. If your prompts are narrow and close to what you sell, a high share is realistic. If they are broad category questions where many brands compete, a lower share can still be a strong result.
The useful benchmark is relative: your visibility compared with the competitors you track, on the same prompts, engines and dates. For example, if the category leader is named in 60% of answers and you are at 20%, that 40-point gap is your target, whatever the absolute number.
Watch the spread across engines too. Being named often by one engine and rarely by the others usually points to a specific cause, such as a crawler block, a missing review profile, or weak coverage in the sources that engine prefers.
What moves it
What affects whether AI names your brand?
AI engines build answers from what they learned in training and, when they search, from pages they retrieve. Several factors shape both.
Whether AI can read your site
If robots.txt blocks AI search crawlers, or key content only appears after JavaScript runs, engines may not be able to use your pages at all.
Whether your pages answer the question
Pages that state plainly what you do, who it is for and how you compare are easier to quote than vague marketing copy.
What others say about you
Reviews, forum threads, comparison articles and directories are common sources. Brands that appear across many of them are easier to recommend with confidence.
How clearly AI knows your brand
Consistent names, descriptions and profiles across the web help an engine tell your brand apart from others and place it in the right category.
Which engine is answering
Each engine searches differently and leans on different sources, so one brand can lead in Perplexity and be missing in ChatGPT.
How the question is phrased
Small wording changes, locations and use cases shift which brands appear. That is why you track a set of prompts, not a single one.
Improve it
How do I improve my AI visibility?
For most brands improvement follows the same order: remove blocks, fill content gaps, then earn the sources AI relies on.
- 01
Unblock AI search crawlers
Check robots.txt for search and retrieval agents such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Bingbot, and make sure core content is in the HTML, not only rendered by JavaScript.
- 02
Answer the prompts you lose
For each tracked prompt where competitors are named and you are not, publish or improve a page that answers it directly, with specifics a model can quote.
- 03
Close citation gaps
Look at which domains AI cites for those prompts. Review sites, forums and articles that cite competitors but not you are where to get listed, reviewed or mentioned.
- 04
Fix how you are described
Read the full answers. If AI gets your pricing, audience or features wrong, correct the pages and profiles it is likely to rely on, starting with your own site.
- 05
Re-measure the same prompts
Keep the prompt set stable and compare runs before and after each change, so you know which change made the difference.
With Rankry
How does Rankry measure AI visibility?
Rankry runs the manual method above at scale and keeps every result, so you spend your time on fixes instead of spreadsheets.
Prompts from your site
At onboarding Rankry reads your site and writes buyer prompts in categories. You can add your own or import a CSV, and choose which engines each new prompt runs on when you add it.
Up to nine AI engines
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Meta Muse are asked through their APIs with web search, one answer per prompt per run. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are captured from Google’s live results on Pro or with Base add-ons, and Copilot uses Azure GPT with Bing web search through Microsoft’s official API.
Every run kept
Reports re-run automatically every day, or every 3 or 7 days if you choose. Each prompt keeps its run history: position when named, who wins the prompt, the sources, a sentiment chip and the full answer for every new run.
From numbers to actions
Visibility, Position, Share of voice, Sentiment and Diversity sit next to the competitors Rankry finds from your first report, the sources AI cites, and an Action plan with steps to improve.
Guides
Keep reading
What is AI visibility in simple terms?
AI visibility is how often AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews mention your brand when people ask about your category. It is usually expressed as the share of answers that name you, across a fixed set of questions.
What does AI visibility mean for a business?
It means whether your brand makes the short list when a buyer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation. High visibility puts you in front of buyers early in their research. Low visibility means competitors get that attention instead, often before anyone visits a website.
Is AI visibility the same as SEO ranking?
No. A search ranking is your position on a results page for a keyword. AI visibility is whether an AI answer names you at all, and where. The two are related, because engines that search the web draw on indexed pages, but a brand can rank well on Google and still be missing from AI answers.
What is an AI visibility score?
Usually the percentage of tracked answers that mention your brand. Some tools blend in position or sentiment. In Rankry, Visibility is the plain share of prompt and engine answers that name you, and a separate Rankry Score combines visibility with position, sentiment and diversity.
How many prompts do I need to measure AI visibility?
Enough to cover the main ways buyers ask about your category. A small business can learn a lot from 10 to 30 well-chosen prompts; brands with many products need more. What matters more than the count is that the prompts stay the same between runs.
Why do I get different answers each time I ask?
AI models generate text with some randomness, engines that search may retrieve different pages each time, and the models are updated. In consumer apps, memory and chat history also change answers. That is why visibility is measured over many prompts and repeated runs.
Does AI visibility affect website traffic?
It can. When an AI answer links to your site, some readers click through, and those visits show up as referrals from domains like chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. Many readers act on the answer without clicking, so visibility also matters for demand you can’t see in referral data. Rankry’s AI Traffic dashboard, on Pro, counts the visits AI engines send you.
Can I improve AI visibility quickly?
Some fixes can work fast: unblocking an AI search crawler or publishing a clear answer page can show up once engines re-crawl it. Earning mentions on review sites, forums and articles takes longer, and changes to what a model learned in training wait for new model versions.
Which AI engines does Rankry track?
Nine AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Meta Muse, asked through their APIs with web search, plus Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, captured from Google’s live results, and Copilot, which uses Azure GPT with Bing web search through Microsoft’s official API. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are on every plan, the Google surfaces are included on Pro and available as paid add-ons on Base, and Claude, Grok, Meta Muse and Copilot are paid add-ons.
Find out how visible you are in AI answers
Rankry writes prompts from your site and shows where ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Meta Muse, Google’s AI answers and Copilot name you.
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