Try it free

What is AI visibility?

AI visibility is how often, and how prominently, AI answers name or cite your business when people ask about the kind of place you run.1

Last updated

Open in ChatGPTOpen in Claude

Why it matters for a small business

On a results page, visibility used to mean your place in a list. The paper that named GEO argues that in an AI answer it depends on how much of the answer draws on you, and how early.1

One question asked once tells you little. Answers shift with the wording, which is why Google's own help suggests asking a question more than one way.2

For Google's own AI features you no longer have to guess. Search Console now reports how often links to your pages were shown in them.3

A made-up apartment in Dubrovnik

Luka asked three AI apps for a "quiet apartment near the old town walls", five times each. His place came up in some answers and not in others, and one answer quoted last year's price. He fixed the price on his listings, kept the list of questions, and asks them again each month.

How to check it yourself

  1. Ask the same questions every month

    Keep a short list of customer questions with your town in them, like "apartment with parking near Lapad beach". Ask each one in a few wordings, as Google's help suggests, and write down who gets named.2

  2. Count your Google AI impressions

    Search Console's report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode and can be grouped by page, so you see which pages Google's AI links.3

  3. Check that crawlers can reach you

    Look at your robots.txt and any bot blocking your host turned on. Google's AI features follow the same Googlebot rules as the rest of Search.4

Questions about AI visibility

Can a tool measure my AI visibility for me?

Some tools ask AI apps questions for you and count the mentions. Google warns that no outside tool sees its ranking or AI systems, so treat those counts as samples.5

Where this comes from

  1. Aggarwal and others, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (arXiv:2311.09735, first posted 16 November 2023, accepted to KDD 2024): names GEO and measures a source's visibility in an AI answer by how much of the answer cites it and wherearxiv.org
  2. AI Overviews give an AI-generated snapshot with links, appear when Google's systems find them helpful, can make mistakes, and Google suggests asking several versions of a questionsupport.google.com
  3. Search Console's Generative AI performance report counts impressions of a site's links in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date; rolled out to all websites on 31 August 2026support.google.com
  4. To be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode a page must be indexed and able to show a snippet; AI Overviews show only when Google judges them additive; important content should be in text; robots.txt rules for Googlebot and nosnippet or noindex controls apply; AI feature traffic counts in the Performance report's Web search type (last updated 10 December 2025)developers.google.com
  5. Google's guide to generative AI search: AEO and GEO describe work on visibility in AI search, which Google treats as SEO; its AI features retrieve pages from the Search index and link those that support the answer; Google Search ignores llms.txt files; no special schema.org markup is needed; Business Profiles help local businesses show in AI responses; measure with the Generative AI performance report; no third-party tool sees Google's ranking or AI systems (last updated 10 July 2026)developers.google.com

Read next

See PlacePilot on your business.

Type your business name. In about three minutes you get your new website, how you show up on Google, and the studio to change anything. Free, no card.

Try it free
Try it free