Foundations
What is AI visibility?
It is the difference between existing on the web and being quotable by the software your customers now ask first.
AI visibility is a simple idea with an awkward name. It is whether an AI assistant — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, or the AI summary sitting on top of Google — can find your page, understand what you sell, and feel confident enough to put your name in an answer.
That last part is the whole game. A model will not name a business it cannot verify. If your pricing lives in an image, your business name appears three different ways across the web, and your key page needs JavaScript to render, an assistant will quietly recommend somebody else. Not because you ranked lower. Because you were harder to read.
How it differs from SEO
Search engines send people to a list of links. Assistants answer the question and mention a handful of sources. The unit of success has changed from a click to a mention.
| Traditional SEO | AI visibility | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in a list | Be named in an answer |
| Unit | The page | The passage |
| Winner takes | Traffic | Trust |
| Fails when | You rank low | You are ambiguous |
The good news: the two overlap heavily. Almost everything that makes you AI-visible also makes you better at classic SEO. Structured data, clear headings, fast server-rendered HTML, honest contact details — search engines have wanted these for a decade. What has changed is the cost of not doing them. A slightly disorganised page used to rank slightly lower. Now it gets left out of the answer entirely.
The four things that decide it
Every check on this site sorts into one of four questions.
- Machine-readable — can a crawler parse who you are without running JavaScript?
- Answer-shaped — is your content written in chunks that can be lifted as a direct answer?
- Reachable — are AI crawlers allowed in, and is there a map pointing at what matters?
- Trustworthy — is there enough signal for a model to risk attaching your name to a claim?
Miss any one badly and the other three stop mattering. A beautifully structured page behind a Disallow: / is invisible. A perfectly crawlable page with no author, no date and no contact details is readable but too risky to cite.
What this is not
It is not a growth hack, and it is not a new channel you have to learn from scratch. It is mostly hygiene: describing your business in machine-readable terms, answering questions where you already half-answer them, and removing the small ambiguities that make a model hesitate.
Most sites we check score between 45 and 70. The gap is almost never talent or budget — it is a missing FAQ block, a title that runs to 80 characters, and eleven images with no alt text.
The fastest way to see where you sit is to run the free check on one page. It takes about a minute and nothing leaves your browser.
Common questions
Is AI visibility the same as SEO?
No, though they overlap. SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links. AI visibility aims to have your business named inside a generated answer. Most classic SEO work helps, but AI visibility puts far more weight on structured data, unambiguous entity information and content written in liftable chunks.
Do I need to do anything special, or is good SEO enough?
Good SEO gets you most of the way. The three things it commonly misses are an llms.txt file, explicit robots.txt rules for AI crawlers, and FAQ schema on pages that already answer questions.
How long does it take to see a change?
Structured data and crawler permissions take effect as soon as the crawler next visits, typically days to weeks. Entity trust — consistent naming across the web — takes months.
Take this to your assistant
Paste it into ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or Gemini and apply it to your own website.
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