AI visibility
AI visibility is how often AI platforms name your brand when people ask the questions your customers ask.
AI visibility is how often AI platforms name your brand when people ask the questions your customers ask. If ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews answer a question about your category and leave you out, you're not visible for that question.
It's the first thing to know in AI search, because everything else, from how you're described to who's named first, only matters once you're named at all.
How it's measured
The usual way is to ask the platforms a set of questions, which are called prompts, and count the answers that name you. Visibility is the share of answers that name you, out of all the answers.
For example, if you track 10 questions on 2 platforms for a week, that's 140 answers. If 49 of them name you, your visibility is 35%.
Tools count this differently. Some leave out answers that name no brand at all. We keep them in, because a customer who asked and heard no brand didn't hear yours either. That's one reason two tools rarely show the same number.
Why it goes up and down
AI platforms rarely give the same answer twice, so visibility moves a little every day without anything changing on your side. A single day's number tells you very little. Looking at a week of answers, and comparing it with the week before, tells you much more.
How to improve it
Most answers are written from pages you don't own: reviews, comparisons, directories and forum threads. The quickest wins usually come from finding the pages the platforms read for your questions and getting named on them, and from making sure the platforms can read your own site.
AI visibility in AnswerOrbit
Visibility is the first number on your Overview. You can split it by topic, platform, market or competitor, and click it to read the answers behind it. What the numbers mean has the full rule.