AI-search visibility
Also called generative engine optimisation, GEO, AI visibility, answer engine optimisation
Whether, and how, a brand or page is mentioned in the answers generated by assistants and AI search surfaces. Unlike a rank check it has no position to read: the output is a paragraph, it varies between runs, and it frequently produces no click at all.
Rank tracking works because a SERP has an order. A generated answer does not. It is prose, it is produced fresh, it differs between two identical prompts, and it may cite nothing you can attribute.
What cannot honestly be claimed. A position. A share. A trend from a small number of samples. Anyone selling a precise AI visibility percentage is selling a number whose error bars they have not shown you.
What can be sampled. Whether a brand is named in the answer to a given prompt, on a given platform, at a given time — repeated often enough that the proportion means something. That is a sampling exercise, and its honest output is a rate with a sample size beside it, not a rank.
Why it is worth sampling anyway. A query answered in full by an assistant produces no click for analytics to count and no impression for Search Console to attribute, while still being an occasion on which the brand was or was not consulted. That is a gap in every other measurement a site has.
netweft’s AI visibility lookups read exactly this — for the project’s domain, one platform at a time, priced per platform — and the figure is labelled estimated rather than verified against a vendor invoice wherever it appears, because the underlying cost is modelled rather than billed back to us line by line. A product that measures honesty in other people’s numbers has to be first in line about its own.
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