Search visibility
Search visibility estimates how much of the clicks from search results your site gets for a set of keywords, based on its rankings.
Search visibility is an estimate of how much of the available clicks your site gets from search results for a set of keywords. SEO tools work it out from your rankings: a first place earns a big share of the clicks, a tenth place a small one, and a page that doesn't rank earns none. Add it up across your keywords and you get one percentage.
It's a handy way to track your SEO progress as a single line, without staring at hundreds of rankings.
How it's estimated
Each tool uses its own click curve, a guess at what share of people click each position. So a site at 18% visibility in one tool might be at 12% in another, and neither number is a count of real visits. Compare visibility over time in the same tool, with the same keywords.
For example, say Harrow & Pine tracks 50 keywords. It ranks first for five, somewhere in the top ten for twenty, and nowhere for the rest. A tool might put its visibility at 22%. If Harrow & Pine climbs to first for ten keywords next month, the number rises, even before any extra visits show up in its analytics.
Search visibility vs AI visibility
AI search has no list of ten positions to weight. An AI platform either names you in its answer or it doesn't, and you might be named first or fifth.
So AI visibility is measured another way: ask the questions your customers ask, many times, and count the share of answers that name you. The two can tell different stories. A site can rank well and rarely be named, because the platforms read other sites for that question, or rank poorly and be named often, because reviews and lists elsewhere mention it.
In AnswerOrbit
Our visibility is the share of your answers that name you, over the last seven days. Every answer counts, including ones that name no brand at all. If 49 of your 140 answers name you, your visibility is 35%. See What the numbers mean.