AI Ranking
AI ranking is the position a business or a page holds inside the answer an assistant writes: whether it is named at all, and how early. It is composed fresh for every answer rather than stored in an index, so it is measured as a rate across many questions, not read off a single result.
An order that is written, not stored
A search engine holds a ranked index and returns the same positions to everyone who types the same words. An assistant holds nothing of the kind. For each question it retrieves candidate pages, reads them, and writes a list, and the order of that list comes from what the fetched passages said and how plainly they said it. Ask again and the retrieval may differ, and so may the order. There is no position to hold, only a frequency with which you are named and a tendency to be named early.
Measuring something that will not stand still
Because a single answer is one draw, a rank has to be estimated from many. This site puts a panel of twelve buyer questions to one assistant, Claude with live web search, and records, for every answer, whether the business appears, whether it comes first, and who else is named. The score is the share of the panel that named the business, with being named first reported beside it rather than weighted in, and the panel is asked again on the same questions, once the fixes are live and every month with monitoring, so that movement in the score is movement in the answers. The methodology page sets out the method. One detail from the September 2026 probe shows why the repetition matters: of 9,240 one-question answers from Claude, 5,928 gave a clearly differentiated list and the rest hedged, offering no order at all. Detail in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler.
A common question
Does a Google ranking carry over into an AI answer?
Partly, and only for Google. Google's documentation says its AI features have no additional requirements beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, so a page that ranks is a candidate there. Other assistants run their own retrieval, and a candidate is still only a candidate: the passage has to carry an answer before the assistant will name the business. This site has not measured how closely search position and AI position track each other.
Related terms
Sources
Google’s eligibility statement: Google’s documentation on AI features in Search. The panel method is this site’s own, on the methodology page; the probe counts are from its audit records, one assistant, one question per business.