Search Standing/AI Visibility
AI Visibility

When a buyer asks an AI who supplies this, does it say your name?

AI SEO services and AI visibility measurement answer a question no company can check reliably on its own: whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews name your business when a buyer asks who does what you do.

Measured across four engines, with the sources those engines cite.

The measurement[1]

What is AI visibility?

AI visibility is the extent to which AI answer engines mention and cite a business when users ask questions in its category. It is measured by mention count, citation count, which specific pages are cited, and the share of relevant prompts on which a company appears at all.

It matters because the answer increasingly replaces the click. When a buyer asks an assistant who supplies kitting services in a region, the response names two or three companies and cites a handful of sources. Companies outside that set are not ranked lower. They are absent.

The direction of travel is documented outside our own work. Semrush tracked Google AI Overview appearance rising from roughly 6.5 percent of queries in January 2025 to a peak near 25 percent that July across a ten-million-keyword sample. BrightEdge, measuring nine commercial industries, recorded 48 percent of queries triggering an AI Overview by February 2026. Seer Interactive measured organic click-through on those queries falling from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent. Prevalence estimates vary by methodology and should be read as a range rather than a figure.

How an AI answer is assembledA buyer question is answered using directory listings, review profiles, industry roundups and supplier websites. Three competitors are named and the subject company is absent. A buyer asks “who does kitting and fulfillment” SOURCES CONSULTED Directory listings Review profiles Industry roundups Supplier websites In most industrial categories the first three outweigh the fourth. The answer Competitor A Competitor B Competitor C You, absent Being absent from the sources an answer is built from is the same as being absent from the answer.
How an AI answer gets built, and where a supplier goes missing.

From our own measurement: in one industrial market analysed in July 2026, we measured seven local companies. Not one appeared in the Google AI Overview returned for their own category. Three companies from outside that set did, including a national franchise brand and an online print shop. The measured AI visibility scores of the seven ranged from 14 to 35, which told us far less than the live answer did.

Method[2]

How do you measure AI visibility?

Across four engines, on prompts a real buyer would use, checking three things: whether you are mentioned, whether you are cited, and which sources the answer was built from.

EngineWhat is measured
ChatGPTMentions, cited pages, and whether the citation is your site or a third party
Google AI OverviewsPresence in the answer block above ordinary results, and trigger rate across your terms
Google AI ModeMentions in the conversational search interface
GeminiMentions and source attribution

Tool-reported scores are a starting point and no more. Every finding is checked against a live answer, because the two frequently disagree. A composite score of 34 out of 100 means very little; being absent from an answer that names three competitors means a great deal.

Traditional SEO compared with AI visibility workTraditional SEO focuses on ranking position, click-through, backlinks, page speed and keyword targeting. AI visibility work focuses on definitional clarity, quotable answers, entity resolution, third-party source presence and structured markup. TRADITIONAL SEO AI VISIBILITY Ranking positionDefinitional clarityClick-through rateSelf-contained answersBacklink volumeEntity resolutionPage speedPresence in cited sourcesKeyword targetingStructured markupThe two overlap heavily. AI systems mostly cite what already ranks, so the same work serves both.
Where the disciplines diverge. They overlap more than they differ.
What changes it[3]

Can you actually optimise for ChatGPT and AI Overviews?

Yes, but not by any technique specific to AI. These systems overwhelmingly cite pages that already rank, so the work that improves organic position improves citation. Four things then determine whether a ranking page gets quoted.

Definitional clarityA plain sentence defining the service, early on the page. Definitions are quoted more than any other sentence type.
Self-contained answersPassages that read correctly lifted out of the page. If an answer needs context, it will not be used.
Entity resolutionStructured data and consistent listings so the system knows which company, in which place, doing what.
Third-party sourcesIn most industrial categories, AI answers lean on directories and review profiles more than on supplier sites.
Hard specificsNumbers, timeframes and ranges. Vague claims are not quotable and are not quoted.
Crawler accessIf GPTBot or ClaudeBot are blocked in robots.txt, none of the above matters.
What we deliver[4]

What do you actually deliver?

Three pieces, in order: an analysis establishing where you stand, a build specification stating exactly what to construct, and optionally the pages themselves. Most companies start with the first and decide from there.

01 / ANALYSIS

Where you stand

Your position in search and AI answers, who is beating you, what share of your market you capture, and the reasons behind all three.

02 / SPECIFICATION

What to build

Every page mapped. Target term, URL, headings, schema, internal links, priority order. Written so your developer can work straight from it.

03 / PAGES

The writing

Optional, quoted separately. Most specifications die on delivery because nobody writes the pages. We write them if you want us to.

Questions[5]

Common questions about AI visibility

What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is the extent to which AI answer engines mention and cite a business when users ask questions in its category. It is measured by mention count, citation count, which specific pages are cited, and the proportion of relevant prompts on which a company appears. It differs from search ranking in that there is no position two: a company is either named in the answer or it is not.
Can you optimise for ChatGPT?
Not through any technique specific to ChatGPT. AI systems overwhelmingly cite pages that already rank well in conventional search, so the work that improves ranking improves citation. What determines whether a ranking page gets quoted is its construction: plain definitions, self-contained answers, hard specifics, structured markup, and consistent presence in the third-party sources those systems draw on.
What are GEO and AEO?
Generative engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation are terms for the practice of making content likely to be cited in AI-generated responses. In practice both describe the same work: writing pages that answer questions directly and are structured so a machine can extract a correct, self-contained passage. The vocabulary is new; most of the underlying practice is not.
Do AI systems only cite pages that already rank?
Largely, though not exclusively. Published analyses have found that a large majority of pages cited in Google AI Overviews already rank in the top ten organically. The significant exception is third-party sources. In many industrial and local categories, directories and review profiles are cited more often than the suppliers’ own websites, which means presence on those sources is part of the work.
How long does it take to appear in AI answers?
Longer than conventional ranking improvements, because citation generally follows ranking rather than preceding it. Expect three to six months for meaningful change on a page that was previously invisible, and note that citation positions are not permanent. When Google changed the model behind AI Overviews in early 2026, a substantial proportion of previously cited domains were replaced within weeks.
Is AI visibility worth measuring yet?
It depends on the category, and the honest answer is that prevalence varies widely by industry and query type. In categories where buyers research before contacting a supplier, it is already material. The strongest argument for measuring now is that almost nobody in most B2B categories is doing so, which means the positions are cheap to take and expensive to reclaim later.
Start[7]

Find out whether AI answers name you.

Send your company and your market. We will measure your presence across four AI answer engines, identify which sources they draw on for your category, and send back what we find.

No call required and no obligation. Read it, check it yourself, and decide. If the findings are worth discussing after that, we can talk then.