AI Visibility

AI visibility is how often, and how prominently, a business is named when people ask AI assistants the questions its customers ask. It is a measurement of a state, not a technique: generative engine optimization is the work, AI visibility is the reading you take before and after.

How it is measured

Twelve buyer questions for one trade in one place are put to one assistant, Claude with live web search, and every answer is kept verbatim so the evidence behind the number can be read. For each answer, three things are recorded: whether the business was named, whether it was named first, and who else was named alongside it. The share of the answers that named the business is the score, from 0 to 100, with being named first reported beside it, and measured again on the same questions, once the fixes are live and every month with monitoring, so that movement means something. The methodology page sets this out in full.

What the numbers look like

On a one-question probe of 9,240 small businesses in September 2026, put to Claude with web retrieval, 14.9% were named; among the 5,928 answers that gave a clearly differentiated list rather than a hedge, 17.7%. That is a Claude number, from one question per business on one day, and it is directional rather than a rate. One more thing from the same answers: of every name the assistant returned, 99.4% were businesses and 0.6% were directories or aggregators. The search results page for the same questions is mostly aggregators. The details are in the 9,483-site article.

What moves it

The same three things a generative engine needs: a page the crawler receives, a passage it can lift, and a business it can identify. The audit behind the probe found the businesses that were named were, on inspection, the ones whose sites had answer-shaped content and a consistent name, address and phone number. That is the observation the measurement exists to test, reading after reading.

A common question

Is AI visibility the same as ranking?

No. A ranking is a position in a list that the same query returns to everyone. AI visibility is the share of a set of questions in which an assistant names you at all, and how it names you when it does. Two businesses can hold the same search position and have very different visibility, because the assistant writes one answer and mentions only a few names in it.

Sources

The probe and audit figures are this site’s own, computed from its audit records. Sample drawn per metro and trade, not from a random frame; the probe used one assistant and one question per business. For the mechanism, Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (KDD 2024).