What is AI visibility and how is it scored?
By Nick Albertini · Updated
Search rankings tell you where you appear in a list of links. AI visibility asks a different question: when someone asks an assistant, are you in the answer? Here is what the term means and exactly how Mentioned scores it.
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is how often AI assistants name and link to your business when people ask the questions you want to be the answer to. It covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, and it is measured across many questions because a single answer is too variable to judge by.
It overlaps with SEO but is not the same thing. Good search rankings help, because assistants often read top results, yet many businesses with strong SEO are rarely named in assistant answers.
How does Mentioned measure Presence?
Presence is the share of answers that name you. Mentioned asks each of your questions to four assistants, both exactly as written and as a request for recommendations, and counts how many answers mention your business. Being named in 6 of 10 answers gives a Presence score of 60.
Answers that fail to come back, because a provider had an outage for example, are left out rather than counted against you. Presence carries 30% of the overall score, the largest share, because being named is the outcome that matters most.
What counts as a citation?
A citation is an answer that links to your website as a source, not just one that names you. The Citations score is the share of answers that do. Citations matter because they send visitors and show that the assistant trusts your site as evidence.
Citations carry 25% of the overall score. Being named without a link is common for well-known brands; being linked usually means a page on your site answered the question better than the alternatives.
What is Site Readiness?
Site Readiness checks whether assistants can read and use your website. It scores four things: schema.org markup that says who you are, headings phrased as customer questions with direct answers, AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, and your name, address and phone shown consistently.
Mentioned crawls up to 50 of your public pages to score it, and each check comes with a plain explanation of what passed and what did not. It carries 25% of the overall score and is usually the quickest to improve, because every fix is on your own site.
What is Entity Footprint?
Entity Footprint measures whether you exist in the places assistants check to confirm who a business is: Wikidata, Wikipedia and Google Business Profile. A record that links back to your domain earns full points; a name-only match earns half, because it may be a different business.
Consistency counts here too. A Business Profile that uses the same name as your site scores higher than one that does not. Entity Footprint carries 20% of the overall score.
How is the overall AI Visibility Score calculated?
It is a weighted average of the four sub-scores: Presence 30%, Citations 25%, Site Readiness 25% and Entity Footprint 20%, rounded to a number from 0 to 100. The weights favour what customers experience, being named and linked, over the groundwork that leads to it.
The sub-scores matter more than the total. A low Presence with a high Site Readiness points to a reputation gap off your site; the reverse points to fixes on it. The report's fix list is ordered by which change should move the score most.
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