AI visibility is how often AI answers mention your firm when buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Google’s AI who to use. The answers vary every time, so you measure it as a share of many answers, not as a place in a list. It goes up when your pages are indexed, turn up in the searches the engines run, and are backed by the directories and lists those engines read.
What counts as appearing in an AI answer?
Three separate things, which people often lump together:
- NamedYour firm’s name appears in the answer.
- CitedOne of your pages is linked as a source.
- RecommendedThe answer puts you forward as a fit for what the buyer asked.
They don’t always come together. Our one test so far used freight questions. When we asked Perplexity on 13 November 2026 which firms do ADR haulage in the Midlands, it named one firm and then added that its listed address is in Lancashire, so its Midlands connection is less direct than the others’. Named, but hardly recommended. ChatGPT, asked the same question, linked to a directory listing for one of the firms rather than to the firm’s own site: named, but cited from someone else’s page.
Why is there no fixed position in AI answers?
Because the answers are generated fresh each time, and the list shifts from one run to the next. SparkToro had 600 volunteers put the same 12 prompts to ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI, 2,961 answers in all. It found less than a 1 in 100 chance that ChatGPT or Google’s AI would give the same list of brands twice, and the same list in the same order came up roughly once in a thousand runs.
So a report that gives your “position” in ChatGPT is describing one answer on one day. What you want to know is how often you’re in the answer at all.
Do the different AI engines agree?
Not often. BrightEdge compared brand recommendations across ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, and found the same brands on all three for only 17% of queries.
A single blended score hides the thing you most need: which engine leaves you out. An accountancy practice can be named reliably on one and missing on another.
A note on our own testing: on 13 November 2026 we asked five questions about UK freight firms on ChatGPT, with web search on, and on Perplexity, a single run of each. The shortlists barely overlapped. For ADR haulage in the Midlands the two engines named 17 different firms between them, only 2 of them on both lists, and for a customs broker no firm was on both. That is enough to see that the engines disagree and what their answers lean on, not enough to measure how much each one moves from run to run.
How do you measure AI visibility?
The way you’d measure anything that varies: repeatedly, and with the count stated.
- Write down the questions your buyers ask“Who does R&D tax claims for engineering firms in the North West?”, phrased the way a buyer would phrase it. Leave your firm’s name out: asking about yourself tells you what AI says about you, not whether it brings you up.
- Ask each question several times on each engineA single answer is an anecdote. Several give you a rate.
- Record the share that name you, engine by engine“Named in 5 of 20 Perplexity answers” is more honest than “25%”, because it shows how often you asked.
- Track citations separatelyMicrosoft Clarity’s AI citations report counts how many times your pages are referenced in AI answers. It doesn’t tell you whether you were named.
- Look at who keeps getting namedThe firms that come up most are the ones whose pages the engines keep finding. Read their service pages and directory listings and note what yours lack.
What does a good AI visibility score look like?
There is no target that applies to everyone. A question with only a few credible answers, such as patent attorneys for medical devices in Cambridge, can name the same handful of firms most of the time. A broad one, such as “best IT support company in the UK”, spreads its mentions across many more firms, so even the leaders show up less often.
So judge your share against the firms your buyers weigh you against, on the engines those buyers use. Being named more often than your three nearest rivals is a better result than any number on its own.
How is AI visibility related to SEO?
AI visibility is the outcome. Most of the work behind it is SEO, because the engines search the web before they recommend a supplier. Getting named takes three steps:
- IndexedGoogle says there are no special optimisations needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. ChatGPT search needs OpenAI’s crawler, OAI-SearchBot, allowed in, and Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot. Our robots.txt checker shows which AI crawlers can read your site.
- FoundYour pages turn up for the searches the engines run, which reach well beyond your main keywords. Ahrefs found that only about 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews also ranked in Google’s top 10 for the same search.
- MentionedDirectories, registers and lists in your sector include you. The engines read those when a buyer asks who to use. Our ChatGPT guide shows what the answers in our test leaned on.
A tracking tool shows you the share. What moves it is changes to your site and to the pages that mention you. That is what IndexFirst does for UK service businesses that sell to other businesses: real changes to your site every working day, each one checked before it goes live, for £1,750 a month. We promise the work, not a ranking.
Questions
Is AI visibility the same thing as AEO or GEO?
Not quite. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are names for the work. AI visibility is what you measure at the end: how often the answers name your firm.
Does a service business need an AI visibility tool?
Only if someone will act on what it tells you. If you do the work in-house, a tool shows whether it is paying off. If you pay someone to do the work, the tracking should be part of what you get.
Can you pay to be named in AI answers?
Be wary of anyone who says you can. Google says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking in its search results, and AI answers change far more than search rankings do. What you can pay for is the work that makes you easier to name.