What is AI visibility, and how do you measure it?

People increasingly ask AI assistants questions they used to type into a search engine: "Who is the best accountant in Leeds?" or "Which CRM suits a ten-person team?". The answer is a short piece of writing that names a handful of businesses. AI visibility is how often, and how accurately, your business is part of those answers.

Mentions, citations and recommendations are different things

It is tempting to collapse everything into one score. Don't. Three separate things can happen:

• Mention: your name appears in the answer text.
• Citation: the answer links to a source, for example your website or a directory listing. Only some providers return sources.
• Recommendation: the answer actively suggests you. This is a judgement about wording, so it is harder to measure reliably than a mention.

The metric that is easy to get right: mention rate

Mention rate is the share of successfully analysed answers that contain your brand. If you ask 20 questions and your name appears in 6 answers, the mention rate is 30%. Always show it per provider and always show the sample size. Two providers can behave very differently, and averaging them hides that.

Competitor share and gaps

For each question you can also record which competitors were named. Two useful views follow:

1. Share of mentions: your mentions divided by the mentions of you plus the competitors you track.
2. Visibility gaps: questions where a competitor is named and you are not. Gaps are the most actionable list you can get, because each one is a specific question you can address.

Be honest about variance

AI answers are not fixed rankings. The same question can produce different answers on different days, and small samples swing wildly: 2 out of 5 and 4 out of 10 are not meaningfully different. Treat a single scan as a snapshot, compare like with like over time, and be cautious about drawing conclusions from fewer than a few dozen answers.

What to do with the result

Start with the gaps. For each one, check whether your website answers that question clearly, whether the facts about your business are consistent across your site and listings, and whether sources the provider cites mention you. Content that answers the question directly and accurately is a reasonable response, but there is no guarantee that any single page will change what an assistant says.