Three outcomes people call the same thing
Ask most tools whether you’re “visible in AI” and you’ll get a number. The problem is that the number usually blurs three very different things:
- Cited — a page of yours was used as a source, or a link to you appears somewhere in the answer.
- Mentioned — your name shows up in the text, in passing, among others.
- Recommended — when the customer asks who’s best or who to hire, the engine names you as the answer.
Only the third one sends you a client. You can be cited as a source the engine read and still not be the business it recommends. You can be mentioned in a list of five and lose to the one described as the best choice. A visibility score that counts citations, or counts any appearance of your name, will tell you you’re doing fine while the recommendation goes to someone else.
Why a single check tells you nothing
Here’s the part almost every do-it-yourself check gets wrong: AI answers are not stable. Ask the same engine the same question three times and you can get three different shortlists. The model samples; the web it reads shifts; the answer moves.
So a screenshot of ChatGPT naming you once is not a position — it’s one roll of the dice. And a screenshot of it not naming you once isn’t a verdict either. What you actually want is the rate: across many runs of the question your customers really ask, how often are you the answer? That number is stable enough to act on. The single result is just noise dressed up as a finding.
What to measure instead
The honest metric is narrow and boring, which is why it works: the rate at which you’re recommended for a specific customer question, on a specific engine, across repeated runs — counting every run. Reported per engine, never blended into one score, because the engines disagree and a blended average hides exactly the surface you’re losing.
That’s the whole reason our reports run every high-intent question at least three times on each of the six engines and hand you the rate, with the runs on file. Not a citation count. Not a single lucky screenshot. The number that answers the only question that matters: when your next customer asks who to hire, how often is the answer you?