AI visibility
Definition: AI visibility describes how often and how accurately AI assistants and AI search features such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews mention, recommend or cite a brand or website.
Also called: AI search visibility, LLM visibility, AI brand visibility
Updated
Two layers, measured differently
It helps to split AI visibility into two layers, because the fixes live in different places.
Readiness (on your site). Can AI systems fetch, read and quote your pages? This covers crawler access in robots.txt and at the firewall, content that exists in the HTML without JavaScript, snippet controls, clear headings and consistent information about who you are. You control all of it.
Presence (across the web). Do AI answers actually mention or cite you for the questions that matter? This depends mostly on what other sites say about you: reviews, comparisons, forum threads and press. You influence it, slowly.
A site can be fully ready and still invisible, because no one discusses it. A well-known brand can be widely mentioned while its own pages are blocked from citation.
How to check each layer
- Readiness: the free audit scores this in its AI readiness dial, including a test that fetches your page as several AI crawlers and compares the response. The methodology lists what it covers.
- Presence: run a fixed set of real customer questions in each assistant and record mentions and citations over time. See AI share of voice.
There is no industry-standard AI visibility score. Vendor claim applies to any single number a tool reports, including ours; check what it counts before comparing figures across tools.
What moves the result
On-site fixes remove barriers quickly. Presence improves when you give other sites reasons to mention you: original data, useful tools, expert commentary and a product people recommend. The AI visibility checker covers both layers, and the AI visibility guide goes platform by platform.