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.
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.
How three tools define it
| Tool | Term | Definition, as published |
|---|---|---|
| Peec AI | Visibility | “Percentage of AI responses where your brand appears” |
| Peec AI | Share of Voice | “Percentage of your brand mentions in AI responses compared to all tracked brands mentioned” |
| Otterly.AI | Brand Coverage | “Percentage of prompts that mention my brand compared to all prompts” |
| Otterly.AI | Share of Voice | “The share of my brand compared to all brands”, calculated as your brand’s mentions over all brand mentions |
| Semrush | AI Visibility Score | “A benchmark score (0–100) showing how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers compared to competitors” |
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.
Why two tools can disagree
The denominator 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”. There is no score out of 100.
Answers are collected through the engines’ APIs and search results, which can differ from what a person sees in the app.
Three questions to ask of any AI visibility number
- What is it a share of: answers, prompts or brands?
- How many times was each question asked, and on which dates?
- 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.
Drafted with AI assistance. Every factual claim was checked against the sources above.
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