What Is AI Visibility, and How Is It Measured?

AI visibility is how often AI answers name or cite your brand when someone asks a question you would want to be part of. There is no single standard way to calculate it. Tools use the same phrase for different sums, so a figure from one tool can’t safely be compared with a figure from another. The work of trying to improve it goes by other names, such as GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization). The post generative engine optimization: what the terms mean sorts them out.

What gets measured

Three different things sit under the name.

• Mentions: whether your brand’s name appears in an answer.
• Citations: whether a page from your site is listed as a source.
• Position and share: where you appear in an answer, and how your mentions compare with competitors’.

Peec AI’s documentation says brand visibility and source visibility are separate: your content can be cited without your brand being mentioned, and the other way round.

What is AI brand visibility?

AI brand visibility is the mentions side of AI visibility: how often an answer names your brand, whether or not it links to your site. The headline figure in each tool’s definition below is built on it. Citations, where your site is listed as a source, are counted separately. For a product, Bevizio counts an answer that names your product or cites your own domain, as set out under “How Bevizio counts it”.

How three tools define it

Semrush’s definitions page points to a separate article for the calculation. That article describes the score as combining topic coverage (how many topics include your brand, compared with other domains) and mention consistency (how often your brand is mentioned within those topics). Otterly.AI says that when Google AI Overviews don’t appear for a prompt, those cases are left out of its Brand Coverage and Domain Coverage figures.

Is there an AI visibility score?

There is no standard one. In the pages we read on October 7, 2026, Semrush defines an “AI Visibility Score” from 0 to 100 against competitors. Peec AI’s Visibility is a percentage of responses. Otterly.AI’s KPI page defines Brand Coverage, a percentage of prompts, and a Brand Visibility Index, but no single 0 to 100 visibility score. A score from one tool can’t safely be read against a number from another, because each is a different sum.

Bevizio reports counts, not a score. A score out of 100 doesn’t show how many answers sit behind it, so a score built on a handful of answers can look as solid as one built on hundreds. A count such as “named in 9 of 60 answers” keeps the denominator, the number you divide by, in view.

Why two tools can disagree

A prompt is one question a tool asks, and a response is one answer to it. The denominator, the number a tool divides by, changes: Peec’s visibility counts responses, Otterly.AI’s coverage counts prompts, and the share-of-voice figures count mentions against other brands’ mentions. Beyond the maths, tools can differ in which questions they ask, which engines they cover, how often they ask each one, and whether they collect answers through APIs or from the apps. Because one question can get different answers each time, how many times it is asked matters as much as any formula. Why we ask the same question 8 times a week covers the research, and AI visibility tools compared sets out how several tools collect and show their data.

How Bevizio counts it

Bevizio reports a count, not a score, for example “named in 9 of 60 answers”. An answer counts if it contains your product’s name (or one of up to five alternative spellings you add) or cites your own domain. Answers we couldn’t get, and Google AI Overviews that didn’t appear, are left out of the total and are never counted as a miss. Percentages appear only on pooled numbers with at least 20 answers, and a single question on a single engine is shown as its raw record, for example “named in 3 of the last 4 answers”.

Answers are collected through a data provider (web-interface captures for ChatGPT and Gemini, APIs for Claude and Perplexity, search results for Google AI Overviews), and can differ from what a person sees in the app.

Three questions to ask of any AI visibility number

1. What is it a share of: answers, prompts or brands?
2. How many times was each question asked, and on which dates?
3. Which engines, and how were the answers collected?

A figure that can’t answer those is hard to act on. To see where you stand, the how-to-check guide walks through it by hand. The free check runs one real question across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews with no account, and the live demo shows how the counts look for a real account over time. For a local professional service, there is a dated sample of what the engines cited for US lawyer questions: AI visibility for US law firms.