What is AI Visibility?
AI Visibility is the measure of how often AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Doubao, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi — recommend your business when customers ask questions in your category. Where SEO asks "do I rank on Google?", AI Visibility asks "when a customer asks an AI who to call, does it name me?"
How is AI Visibility measured?
Visora measures AI Visibility with the AI Visibility Index (AVI) — a 0–100 composite of seven metrics, computed from live engine queries using generic discovery questions like "best [category] in [district]", never brand-name queries that guarantee a mention:
- Recall (25%) — what fraction of AI responses name your business (industry equivalent: visibility rate)
- Breadth (15%) — how consistently each engine mentions you (engine coverage)
- Depth (15%) — how much the AI says about you when it does (mention depth / citation prominence)
- Keyword Reach (15%) — across how many distinct queries you appear (query coverage, what a fan-out query set measures)
- Convergence (10%) — whether the engines describe you consistently (narrative consistency)
- Factuality (10%) — whether what they say about you is accurate (accuracy, the inverse of a hallucination rate)
- Rank (10%) — where you appear relative to competitors in the answer (answer position)
Why does AI Visibility matter in Hong Kong?
Hong Kong customers search bilingually and increasingly start at an AI engine instead of a results page. The shift is zero-click: the answer arrives, the customer acts on it, and no visit is ever recorded in your analytics. Across brands scanned in Hong Kong, over 60% of businesses that rank on Page 1 of Google are entirely ignored by AI search engines for the same queries. A business can hold the top organic position and still lose the customer who asked ChatGPT first.
Grounded or parametric? The answer changes the fix
Engines answer in two ways. Grounded (retrieval) engines — Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — fetch pages and cite their sources, so being crawlable and present on the sources they already cite is what moves you. Parametric engines answer from model weights with no retrieval, so entity consistency and the sources those models learned from are the levers. One customer question also fans out into a set of related retrieval queries before the answer is assembled — which is why appearing for one phrasing but not its siblings is the most common way a brand stays invisible.
How is AI Visibility different from SEO?
| Traditional SEO | AI Visibility (GEO) | |
|---|---|---|
| Target | Google blue-link rankings | AI-generated answers and recommendations |
| Key signals | Backlinks, keywords, page authority | Structured data, entity consistency, verifiable trust |
| Success looks like | Position 1–10 on a results page | Being named inside the AI's answer |
| Measured by | Rank trackers, Search Console | Live multi-engine scans (AVI) |
How do I improve my AI Visibility?
- Add JSON-LD structured data (Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQ) so AI engines can parse your facts
- Keep your name, address, and phone identical across your website, Google Business Profile, and directories
- Publish answer-first content — state the answer in the first sentence, then support it
- Build verifiable trust signals: an About page, real contact details, named authors, dated content
- Re-scan monthly — retrieval-based engines reflect changes in days; trained models take months
Where do I start?
Run the free 60-second AI visibility scan — no account required — and see exactly how the 9 engines describe your business today, with a prioritised fix list. For the measurement detail, read the AVI methodology.
Sources and further reading
- Schema.org — the structured-data vocabulary this guide recommends
- Google Search Central — Structured Data — Google's own documentation on machine-readable pages
- llms.txt specification — AI-crawler guidance standard referenced above
Frequently Asked Questions
What is AI Visibility?
AI Visibility is how often AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Google AI, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Doubao, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi — recommend your business when customers ask questions in your category. It is measured as a 0–100 score (the AI Visibility Index) from live engine queries.
Is AI Visibility the same as SEO?
No. SEO targets Google's blue-link rankings; AI Visibility targets the answers AI engines generate. The signals differ — AI engines weight structured data, entity consistency, and verifiable trust far more than backlinks. You can rank #1 on Google and be invisible to ChatGPT.
Can I improve AI Visibility for free?
Yes, the first steps are free: run a scan to get your baseline, add structured data to your site, make your business details consistent everywhere, and publish answer-first content. Visora's free scan shows which of these will move your score most.
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