How we measure AI visibility

The report answers a narrow, practical question: when people ask AI assistants for a business like yours, does the answer recommend you, and who does it recommend instead? Here is exactly how we get there.

1. Customer questions

We create a set of buying-intent questions from your category and location — for example, “Who should I hire for roofing in Austin?”. The same questions are asked on every platform so results are comparable.

2. AI platforms

Questions are sent through the APIs of ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), Grok (xAI) and Muse (Meta AI), with web search enabled. Each answer is stored with the platform, model, question, timestamp, full text and the sources it cited.

API answers are not guaranteed to match what a specific person sees in a consumer app, where results vary by account, location, conversation history and time. The report treats results as a directional snapshot.

3. Mentions and competitors

We detect your business by name and website domain. Competitors are the businesses the AI assistants named in their answers — we never add businesses that weren't mentioned, apart from competitors you list yourself, which are shown even when they received zero mentions.

4. Score

Share of AI answers that recommended your business, weighted by prominence: a mention in the top 3 counts fully, a later mention counts half. Calculated only from questions that were successfully answered. We only show a score when at least 6 answers were collected; otherwise we show raw counts.

5. Website readiness

Separately, we fetch your public homepage, robots.txt and sitemap to check whether AI systems can read and understand your site. This does not measure whether AI recommends you. Your website's content is only analyzed by deterministic checks; it is never fed into an AI model.

6. What #1 on Google could bring

For each search for your service, the visits you'd get at #1 instead of your place today: the share of searchers who click each place, measured on local businesses' own Search Console data (4.7% at #1; a business that sells across the US uses Advanced Web Ranking's 2026 phone data). Of those visitors, the share who call or fill in a form: LocaliQ/WordStream's 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks for your industry. Of those, the customers and what they're worth: typical figures for your industry, which you can change to your own in the report.

7. What AI leaving you out could cost

AI assistants send a business they name in every answer about 8 visits for every 100 Google sends it, as our clients' own Google Analytics show. So we start from the visits Google sends your site, take 8% of them, and count the share of answers that left you out. From there it's the same chain as Google's: the visitors who contact you, then the customers and what they're worth. It counts clicks only, not people who call after reading an answer, so it errs low.

8. What we don't claim

• We don't estimate market share from a small sample of answers.
• Every money figure is an estimate and labeled as one: it combines what we measured and published studies with typical figures for your industry, which you can replace with your own.
• When a platform fails to answer, we say so rather than filling the gap.