Impressions
Impressions count how many times something was shown to people. In AI search, it usually means an estimate of how many people saw an answer naming you.
Impressions are a count of how many times something was put in front of people. In classic search, an impression is one appearance of your page in someone's results. In AI search, tools use the word for an estimate of how many people saw an answer that names you.
It's a tempting number, because it sounds like reach. But in AI search nobody outside the platforms knows how often an answer was shown, so every impressions figure is a guess built on another guess.
Impressions in classic search
Google Search Console counts an impression each time one of your pages appears in someone's results, whether or not they scroll to it or click. That count comes from Google itself, so it's real data about real searches.
Impressions in AI search
The AI platforms don't share how often each answer is shown. So a tool that reports AI impressions has to take the answers it collected and multiply them by an estimate of how often people ask that question.
For example, say you're named in 3 out of 7 answers to "best coffee subscription" this week, and a tool estimates 2,000 people ask that each month. It might report around 850 impressions for the month. Both halves of that sum are estimates, and the platform may have answered other people differently.
Read an impressions figure as a rough way to weigh prompts against each other. Ask the tool where the volume half comes from: some use Google search volume, which only tells you about Google searches.
In AnswerOrbit
We don't report impressions. We report the share of answers that name you, which is something we can count, and we show demand separately. The Demand tab in Topics estimates how many conversations a month use a word or phrase, so you can see which of your prompts people ask most. See Topics and prompts and What the numbers mean.