AI visibility
AI visibility is how present your business is in the answers AI assistants give: whether ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and their relatives name you, cite you, and describe you accurately when your buyers ask. It's the successor metric to rankings, because a growing share of buying decisions now start and finish inside an answer.
Why it matters
The buyers you never see are the point. Someone asks an assistant who to use, gets three names, and contacts one of them. If you're not in the answer, you weren't considered, and no report you currently run will tell you it happened. Visibility in answers is measurable and buildable, and right now it's mostly uncontested, because most businesses haven't started.
How it works
Engines build answers in four steps: they rewrite the question into searches, retrieve a shortlist of pages, read those pages for passages they can lift, and compose one answer that names the businesses the evidence supports. Your visibility is decided by how well your web presence survives that gauntlet: retrievable pages, liftable passages, a clear entity, and facts other sources corroborate.
None of it is magic and none of it is bought. It's evidence, structured so machines can use it.
What to do about it
Measure before you build: write a panel of fifteen to twenty questions your buyers ask, run it through the major assistants, and record who gets named and how you're described. That baseline tells you which gap to work on first, and it's the number you track monthly from then on.
