What is AI visibility?
A growing share of buying decisions now starts with a question to an AI assistant instead of a search box. AI visibility is whether your brand is part of the answer.
When someone asks ChatGPT "what CRM should a small business use?" or asks Gemini for "the best running shoes for beginners", the assistant doesn't return ten blue links. It returns three to six names, usually with a clear favorite. There is no page two. If your brand isn't in that shortlist, you didn't rank low — you didn't exist in the conversation at all.
Why it's different from anything you already track
Web analytics can't see it. When an assistant answers from its own knowledge, no request ever hits your site — the recommendation happens entirely inside the model. You can't check it the way you check a Google ranking either, because every answer is generated fresh: ask the same question five times and you'll get five differently-worded answers, sometimes with different brands. Visibility in AI answers is a statistical property, not a position.
That's why measuring it properly means sampling: asking many realistic questions, many times, across the assistants people actually use, and counting how often — and how prominently — each brand shows up. One answer tells you almost nothing; three hundred answers tell you your mention rate within a percentage point or two.
What AI visibility is made of
- Mention rate — how often you appear in relevant answers at all.
- Position — when you appear, are you the first name or an afterthought?
- Endorsement — are you merely listed, or explicitly recommended?
- Narrative — the attributes assistants attach to you ("affordable", "enterprise-grade", "steep learning curve").
Each AI assistant also has its own view of the world. The same question puts different brands on the shortlist in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — sometimes dramatically so. A complete picture weighs each assistant by how many people actually use it, which is what the helloranked global score does.
Why it matters now
AI answers compress consideration sets. A search results page gives a niche brand a fighting chance on page one; an AI answer gives the reader three names and moves on. Brands in the shortlist compound their advantage — they get tried, written about, and fed back into future training data. Brands outside it become invisible to an entire channel of demand. Knowing where you stand is the first step; that's what the leaderboards are for.