What goes into an AI visibility score
Most scores combine some of these:
- Mention rate: the share of answers that name your brand or domain.
- Position: where you appear when the answer is a list. First of five is worth more than fifth.
- Citation rate: how often your own pages are cited as a source.
- Coverage: how many engines and question types you show up for.
- Readiness: whether AI crawlers can read your site at all.
Why one number can mislead
Weights differ between tools, so a 62 on one tool and a 40 on another may mean the same thing. AI answers also vary from run to run: a score based on one answer per question can move a lot between two checks without anything changing on your side. And a score doesn’t tell you what to do next.
What we report instead
Our AI visibility checker keeps the parts separate, so you can see what moved:
- mention rate per engine (OpenAI and Gemini), with the number of answers behind it;
- average list position when you are mentioned;
- competitors ranked by how often they are named;
- every cited source, ranked by frequency, with one action per source;
- a readiness checklist for your site.
If you want a single number for tracking, use the mention rate from the full report: it repeats each question and covers both engines, so it moves less from noise. For the steps to improve it, read the AI visibility audit guide or the GEO audit checklist.
A fair way to compare an AI visibility score over time
- Keep the same keywords and questions between checks.
- Compare rates, not single answers, and note how many runs each rate is based on.
- Allow a few weeks between checks; new listings and articles take time to be crawled.