How to Measure Your AI Search Visibility

To measure AI search visibility, run a fixed set of buyer prompts through the main AI assistants every month and record whether your organisation is named, how it is described, which sources are cited and who else appears. Combine that with the visits AI tools send to your site, which shows up in your analytics as referral traffic. Four numbers cover most of what matters: mention rate, share of voice, accuracy and AI referral visits.

Why this needs its own method

Search engines give you Search Console: impressions, clicks and positions. AI assistants give you nothing like it. ChatGPT does not tell you how often it recommended you last month. So you have to sample the answers yourself, the same way you would run a customer survey.

Step 1: Build a prompt set

Write 20 to 50 prompts your buyers would plausibly type. Mix four kinds:

• Category prompts: “Who are the best AI agencies in the UK?”
• Problem prompts: “How can a membership body automate renewal reminders?”
• Comparison prompts: “Umbraco or WordPress for a professional body?”
• Brand prompts: “What does Kickass Online do?” and “Is Kickass Online any good?”

Keep the wording fixed from month to month. Changing prompts makes the trend meaningless.

Step 2: Choose the engines

For most UK organisations: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Google AI Overviews or AI Mode. If your buyers are developers, add Claude. Use logged-out or clean sessions so personal history does not colour the answers.

Step 3: Run each prompt more than once

AI answers vary from run to run. Running each prompt two or three times, or tracking a larger set, gives you a fairer picture than a single check. Several tools now automate this, including the AI visibility features in some SEO platforms. A spreadsheet works fine to start.

Step 4: Record four things per answer

1. Named or not. Was your organisation mentioned?
2. Position. First named, in the middle, or an afterthought?
3. Description. Was what it said about you accurate? Wrong services, old prices and the wrong location are common and fixable.
4. Sources cited. Which pages did the assistant link to? Your own, a directory, a competitor’s comparison article?

Step 5: Report the four numbers

Measure	What it tells you	How to calculate
Mention rate	How often you appear at all	Answers naming you ÷ total answers
Share of voice	How you compare with named competitors	Your mentions ÷ all competitor mentions
Accuracy	Whether you are described correctly	Accurate descriptions ÷ answers naming you
AI referral visits	Whether AI is sending real traffic	Visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot and gemini in analytics

Add AI Overview citations if you track them: several SEO tools estimate how often your pages are cited in Google AI Overviews and the visits they bring. For Ali Legal, that figure went from nothing to around 455 visits a month in about six months after their rebuild, which is the kind of trend the report should make visible.

Step 6: Read the sources, not just the score

The most useful part of the exercise is the source list. When a competitor is named and you are not, the cited sources tell you why: a comparison article you are missing from, a directory with your old details, reviews on a platform you ignore. That list is your GEO to-do list.

How to find AI traffic in your analytics

In GA4 or most privacy-friendly analytics tools, look at referral sources for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com. Some AI traffic arrives without a referrer and shows as direct, so treat the figure as a floor. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode clicks appear inside normal Google organic traffic in Search Console rather than separately.

What to do with the numbers

• Low mention rate, accurate when named: you need more third-party mentions and clearer service pages. See how to get recommended by ChatGPT.
• Named but described wrongly: fix the inconsistent sources first: your own site, Google Business Profile, directories, LinkedIn.
• Pages ranked but never cited: rewrite them answer-first. See how to appear in Google AI Overviews.

Our GEO service runs this report for clients every month, next to their Google rankings and enquiry numbers, so AI visibility is judged by the same standard as everything else: did it bring in business?