What an AI visibility score can — and cannot — tell you.

An AI visibility score summarizes a defined set of checks. To interpret it, you need to know which questions were asked, which providers responded and when the collection happened.

Your buyers are not waiting to find you on Google. They are opening ChatGPT and asking: "What is the best [your category] tool for [their use case]?" They are typing into Perplexity and getting a ranked list of vendors before they have looked at a single website.

If your brand is not in that answer, you are invisible at the exact moment a buyer is forming their vendor shortlist.

That is what an AI visibility score measures.

Why AI Visibility Is Different from SEO

SEO measures how well you rank on Google. AI visibility measures something different: whether AI engines cite you as a credible answer when buyers ask natural language questions about your category.

The signals are different. Google prioritises backlinks, technical SEO, and keyword density. AI engines prioritise entity recognition, third-party validation, structured content that directly answers questions, and consistency of brand signals across the web.

A company can rank on page one of Google and still not be cited by AI engines. The search behaviour has shifted.

"The company ranking first on Google is not always the company Perplexity cites. The gap between the two is worth understanding."

How an AI Visibility Score Is Calculated

The scan generates a set of buyer-intent prompts for your business, using your website and public research on how buyers phrase questions. It asks for 24: six in each of four intent categories (informational, discovery, commercial and transactional). It then puts every prompt, at the same time, to up to four AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude), depending on which are available for the scan. The prompts are written for each business, so they will differ from these illustrative examples:

• "What is the best [category] software for [use case]?"
• "Which companies provide [service] for [industry]?"
• "Compare the top [category] tools"
• "Who are the leading [category] agencies?"

For each prompt and each engine the result is a yes or no: was your brand cited? The scan counts a citation when your domain appears as a source in the answer, or when your brand name appears in the answer and a second check confirms the mention is genuine. It does not score how prominently, or in what position, your brand appears.

Each engine’s score is the share of prompts in which that engine cited your brand. Prompts that already name your brand count for less than other prompts, because they are a weaker test of whether buyers who do not know you would find you.

As of October 2026, the overall score is a weighted average of the engine scores — Perplexity 35%, ChatGPT 25%, Claude 25% and Gemini 15% — rounded to a whole number from 0 to 100.

An engine that is not available for a scan, or whose checks all fail, is left out, and the weights of the remaining engines are rescaled so the score is still out of 100.

What Your Score Means

When all of the scan’s checks have completed, the results page labels the overall score in three bands:

A low score does not mean a business has a weak product. It means the AI engines did not cite the brand in the checks that were run.

Four Areas That May Influence Whether You Are Cited

The score is a citation rate. It is not calculated from the four areas below. The scan separately checks whether a business has some of the related signals — an FAQ page, review profiles on Trustpilot, G2 or Capterra, press mentions, Reddit discussions, Medium or Substack content, a YouTube channel and a LinkedIn company page — and uses what it finds to suggest next steps. These checks do not change the score. This is Sparrwo’s working view, not a measured result.

1. Entity recognition — AI engines need to know your brand is a real, established entity in your category. This comes from third-party profiles: Crunchbase, G2, LinkedIn Company page, industry directories, and press mentions. Without these, AI engines have fewer independent sources that confirm your brand.

2. Content that directly answers buyer questions — AI engines pull from content that is structured to answer specific questions. FAQ pages, comparison guides, category explainers, and use-case-specific content all contribute. Generic blog posts do not.

3. Brand consistency across sources — Your company name, category, and description need to be consistent across every third-party source. Inconsistency creates confusion for AI engines and reduces citation probability.

4. Topical authority — Publishing consistently on a specific topic signals to AI engines that you are a credible source in that category. This compounds over time — each piece of content you publish increases the probability of future citations.

How to Check Your AI Visibility Score

You can check your score for free at sparrwo.com/aio-checker. Enter your domain and the tool runs your brand against buyer-intent prompts generated for your business across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.

You get your score when the scan finishes. Entering your email unlocks the full report, including every prompt result and the complete list of keyword suggestions, which are grouped by buyer intent.

Frequently Asked Questions