AI visibility is the share of relevant AI answers in which a brand is named or its pages are cited. Where a Google ranking puts a page in a numbered list, an AI answer names a few brands inside a paragraph and the reader often never clicks. A brand is either in that answer or it is not, so AI visibility is measured by asking the engines a fixed set of buyer questions on a schedule and counting how often the brand appears.

The usual metrics are visibility (the share of prompts where the brand is named by at least one engine), share of voice (the brand's mentions as a share of all brand mentions in those answers), sentiment and tone of what is said, and sources cited (the pages and sites the engines link to). Because answers change from one run to the next, a single answer proves little; the trend across repeated scans is the signal.

AI visibility is improved by generative engine optimization: making pages easy to quote, letting AI search bots read the site, and being present on the review sites and directories the engines consult. For a local business, OpenAI's Business Hub adds a second, aggregate measure: how often ChatGPT showed the business in an answer. SEOmatic's free AI visibility scan measures the first kind across ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI Overviews.