AI Visibility
AI visibility is how consistently a business gets named when AI systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answer a customer's buying question, measured across repeated prompts and multiple engines rather than a single check.
AI visibility describes whether an AI system names your business when someone asks it a question you'd want to answer, like who installs a heat pump near me or best roofer in my city. It's the AI-era version of a search ranking, except there's no single ranking. There's a set of engines, each with its own list of who it recommends.
A single check tells you almost nothing. Ask an AI engine the same question twice and it can return a different set of companies each time, so any real measurement has to run the same prompt repeatedly and track the pattern, not a one-off screenshot.
It also has to run per engine. Profound's research across 100,000 prompts found that ChatGPT and Perplexity overlap on only 11% of the domains they cite: 37.4% of citations were ChatGPT-exclusive and 51.6% were Perplexity-exclusive. A company that shows up reliably in Perplexity answers can be invisible in ChatGPT answers to the same question, so tracking one engine and assuming it represents the others will mislead you.
45% of US consumers say they used an AI tool like ChatGPT for a local business recommendation in the past year, up from 6% the year before, according to BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey. That's the reason AI visibility has become something worth measuring at all: a meaningful and growing share of buying questions now get asked to a chatbot instead of typed into a search box.
Keep exploring the glossary
- Share of Voice (AI)AI share of voice is the percentage of tracked AI answers that name your business instead of a competitor's, measured per engine and across repeated prompts, since a single AI answer isn't a reliable sample.
- Citation (AI answer)In an AI answer, a citation is a source the engine references or links to while generating its response, and the number of sources cited per answer varies widely by engine, from about 2.5 for Copilot up to about 7.7 for Google AI Overviews.
- Answer EngineAn answer engine is an AI system, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews, or Copilot, that responds to a question with a direct written answer naming a small number of options instead of a page of ranked links.
- Prompt VolumePrompt volume is the number of times a buying question gets asked across an AI engine in a measurement, and it needs to be high enough, repeated over time and across engines, to produce a share-of-voice reading you can trust.
Common questions about AI Visibility
- Can I check my AI visibility by asking ChatGPT once?
- Not reliably. The same prompt can return a different list of companies from one run to the next, and results differ by engine, so a single check tells you what happened once, not what typically happens.