Source visibility
Source visibility is how often a website or page is used across AI answers over time, which shows which sites the platforms lean on.
Source visibility is how often a website or a page shows up as a source across a set of AI answers, followed over time. Brand visibility asks how often you're named. Source visibility asks the same question about the pages the platforms read.
It's useful because it tells you where to spend your PR and outreach time. A site that turns up in a third of the answers to your prompts matters more to you than a bigger site that never does.
How to read it
Take every answer to your prompts over a week and count how many of them used a given site. That share is the site's visibility for your questions.
For example, Fernhill Coffee gets 140 answers a week. A food magazine's website is used in 42 of them, so it's in 30% of Fernhill's answers. A national newspaper is used in 7, or 5%. If the magazine hasn't written about Fernhill, that's the first place to pitch.
Watch it move
The number is most useful over time. A source that climbs from 5% to 20% in a month has become one of the places the platforms trust for your subject, and getting onto it now is worth more than it was. A source that drops away may have changed its pages or fallen out of favour with one platform.
Look at it platform by platform too. ChatGPT and Perplexity can lean on quite different sites for the same question.
In AnswerOrbit
The Domains and Pages tabs in Sources show how many answers used each site or page, and how many times it was linked. Movers shows sources that are new this week or used more or less than the week before. Platforms shows which sources each platform prefers. To follow a source over time, click the star next to it, and it appears in Watched.
For your own website, the same idea is your citations number.