What is an AI Visibility Score?

Artificial intelligence has transformed how people search, evaluate, and choose B2B partners. Instead of scrolling through ten pages of search results, decision-makers are now asking AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for recommendations—and trusting the answers they get. That shift means traditional SEO metrics no longer tell the whole story. Rankings and impressions can’t show whether your company shows up inside those AI-generated answers.

That’s where a new metric comes in: the AI Visibility Score.

What Does An AI Visibility Score Measure?

An AI Visibility Score measures how visible your brand is inside AI search results: the summaries and recommendations that AI platforms provide when users ask industry-specific questions. Instead of tracking keyword rankings, this score reflects how often your company is mentioned, cited, or recommended by these AI engines when answering relevant buyer questions.

Think of it as a new layer of search visibility. Traditional SEO tells you how well your pages perform in Google. An AI Visibility Score tells you how well your brand performs in the emerging world of AI, where a single AI response might replace dozens of pages of search results.

At its core, the score analyzes:

• Frequency — how often your brand appears in AI responses.
• Breadth — how many buyer-intent topics and personas your brand shows up for.
• Authority — how relevant and credible your brand appears in context.

The higher your AI Visibility Score, the more likely your company is to be part of the conversation when buyers turn to AI to make decisions.

B2B buyers are changing how they search, and it’s happening fast. Instead of typing queries into Google, they’re asking AI tools direct, conversational questions: “What’s the best industrial marketing agency?” or “Which manufacturers offer sustainable polymers?”

Those answers often include brand names, and if your company isn’t among them, you’re effectively invisible in the new search landscape.

How an AI Visibility Score Is Measured

An AI Visibility Score isn’t a guess. It’s built on structured data that reflects how your brand appears across today’s leading AI platforms. The goal is to measure visibility the way modern buyers experience it: through AI-generated answers, not just traditional search results.

Here’s how the process typically works:

1. Define the Query Set
   Identify the real questions your buyers are asking, the “how,” “what,” and “which” queries tied to your core offerings. These questions span your personas, industries, and solution areas.
   
   
2. Sample Across AI Engines
   Test those queries across AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot to capture how often your brand appears in their responses.
   
   
3. Track Citation Frequency
   Count the number of times your brand is mentioned, linked, or referenced within those AI responses.
   
   
4. Apply Topical Weighting
   Evaluate how relevant each mention is to your core business areas. Citations on high-value topics — those tied to your products or buyer pain points — carry more weight.
5. Calculate the Score
   The data is normalized into a 0–100 index, giving you a clear benchmark of how visible your brand is across AI-powered search experiences.

The result is a simple, trackable metric that turns a complex question (such as “How do buyers see us in AI search?”) into a measurable performance indicator your team can monitor and improve over time.

How to Improve Your AI Visibility Score

Improving your AI Visibility Score starts with building the kind of content and authority signals that AI tools trust — not just for keywords, but for context, expertise, and credibility. It’s about positioning your brand as the best possible answer to your buyers’ most important questions.

Here’s where to focus:

• Publish Buyer-Intent Content
  Create pages and resources that directly answer the questions your audience is asking AI tools. Use conversational phrasing that mirrors how people actually search.
  
  
• Strengthen Your Entity Relationships
  Entities and schema are a technical element becoming more important in AI search. An entity is a clearly defined “thing” (a person, company, product, or concept) that search engines and AI tools can recognize and connect to your brand, while schema is code that gives search engines and AI tools a clear map of who you are, what you offer, and how your content shows that, and structured markup. Using entities, schema markup, internal linking, and consistent naming conventions, AI engines can easily connect your brand to your products, industries, and expertise.
  
  
• Expand Your Topical Authority
  Develop interconnected content around your key offerings. This helps AI recognize depth — not just surface-level coverage — across your focus areas.
  
  
• Build Credible Brand Mentions
  Earn mentions (aka citations) from reputable sites, partners, and media outlets. The more trusted sources reference your brand, the more confidence AI has in including you in its answers.
  
  
• Audit and Update Regularly
  AI ecosystems evolve quickly. Routinely assess where your brand appears (and doesn’t) across platforms like Claude, Copilot, and others, then refine your strategy to fill those gaps.
  
  

Improving your AI Visibility Score isn’t about gaming algorithms — it’s about building the kind of clarity, consistency, and credibility that enters your brand into the AI conversation.

The Future of SEO in the Age of AI

The rise of generative AI doesn’t replace SEO, it evolves it. Traditional search still matters, but the way buyers discover and evaluate information is shifting toward AI-driven summaries, recommendations, and insights. Instead of scanning ten search results, your prospects are reading one trusted answer generated by AI. The question isn’t just “Can people find us on Google?” anymore, it’s “Does AI recognize us as an authority worth mentioning?”

Over time, we’ll see SEO and AI visibility merge into a unified view of digital authority. Structured data, topical depth, and trusted citations will continue to drive success, but the brands that understand how AI perceives them will lead the next wave of organic growth.

Your AI Visibility Score reveals whether your brand is part of that conversation or left on the sidelines.