How we measure something that isn't supposed to be measurable
AI answers are probabilistic. Any tool claiming a single exact "AI ranking" is selling you a screenshot. Here is precisely what we do, what the numbers mean, and the four things we refuse to claim.
Time. Every hour AI answers your market without naming you is an inquiry you never hear about.
Doing this yourself means writing 30 buyer questions, asking each of them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, logging every name, opening every cited page, and then working out who was named more often than you. That is hours of manual querying, recording, deduplication and analysis, and it can become stale as models, search indexes and web content change. We run it end to end in minutes and hand you the finished evidence — every answer, every competitor, every source page — so you can spend your time fixing your website instead of measuring it.
- 1You give us your business name, website, location, industry and email. We read the site and show you what we detected before you pay.
- 2We generate the fixed buyer question set for your industry and city.
- 3Every question goes to all four engines in fresh, logged-out sessions.
- 4We record each answer word for word, plus each page the engine cited.
- 5Names are merged to one business per key, so counts are not double-billed.
- 6You get the report in your inbox, with the raw CSV attached.
What the figures in our reports and shared images actually mean
1. Prompt generation
From your industry and region we build 30 prompts across six intent families: broad discovery, neighborhood-specific, price-sensitive, urgent, review-led and treatment or service specific. The set is fixed per industry, so repeat runs are comparable.
2. Independent engine runs
Each prompt is sent separately to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. Fresh sessions, no chat history, no personalization, no account signals. Region is supplied in the prompt text only — we never spoof location.
3. Name and position extraction
Every business name in each answer is recorded with its position in that answer. Aliases (trading name, agent name, group name) are merged. Prompts where an engine returns no names are excluded from averages and flagged.
4. Visibility scoring
Visibility score = appearance rate × position weight × engine breadth, normalized to 100. A business named first by all four engines on every prompt scores 100. The raw components are always shown next to the score.
Sample size, cadence and wording
- Sample size: 30 fixed buyer questions asked once on each of four engines — 120 recorded answers per market run. A run that returns fewer recorded answers is not published.
- Cadence: public industry snapshots are re-run monthly. Every report and every shared image carries the date of the run it describes; figures from different dates are not comparable line by line.
- Share of recommendations: the percentage next to a business name is its share of every business mention recorded in that run, after aliases of the same business are merged into one name. It is a count of mentions, not a rating, a review score, or a measure of quality, price or outcome.
- Ordering: tables and charts are ordered by that recorded mention count only. Order is an observation about model output on one date, not a ranking, award or endorsement, and no official AI ranking exists.
- Named businesses: business names are published for identification only, with no affiliation or endorsement implied in either direction. Corrections and removal requests.
Four honest limitations, printed in every report
We can't see what any individual customer was told
Answers vary by account history, device and timing. We measure the pattern, not one person's screen.
Citations are indicative, not exhaustive
Some engines cite sources explicitly, some don't. Where citations aren't given, we identify the likely source set and label it as inferred.
We can't guarantee movement
We measure, we do not promise placement. Anyone promising a top-three AI position is guessing.
The score measures coverage, not probability
Your visibility rate is coverage across a defined prompt set — 30 buyer questions asked once on each of four engines, 120 recorded answers. It is not the statistical probability that an individual customer will see the same recommendation.
Small markets produce small reports
If fewer than five businesses are ever named in your category and region, we tell you and refund on request rather than pad the document.