What is AI Visibility?

AI visibility is how often and how prominently your brand appears when real buyers ask AI assistants for product or vendor recommendations. When someone types “What's the best CRM for a 20-person sales team?” into ChatGPT or “Which agencies specialize in B2B demand generation?” into Perplexity, the response they get is the new front page of search — and brands that don't appear there are simply invisible to that buyer.

Traditional SEO optimizes for the ten blue links on a Google results page. AI visibility optimization — often called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — targets a different output: the synthesized, conversational answer that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity generate directly. These answers cite sources, recommend vendors, and increasingly drive purchase decisions without the user ever visiting a search results page.

This free tool gives you a single, honest number — a 0–100 AI Visibility Score — based on how your brand actually performs when queried across all four major AI platforms today.

Why AI Visibility Matters in 2025

Buyers are increasingly starting their research with AI assistants rather than search engines. They ask ChatGPT for software comparisons, consult Claude for technical evaluations, and use Perplexity to source recent recommendations — often before they've visited a single vendor website. Industry estimates suggest that 40% or more of B2B purchase journeys now involve an AI query at some point, and that share is growing month over month.

If your brand does not appear when an AI is asked about your category, you are invisible to this fast-growing segment of buyers. And unlike traditional search, where a page-two ranking at least means you exist, an AI that doesn't know your brand will simply recommend your competitors as if you never existed.

The discipline that addresses this gap is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the practice of making your brand legible, citable, and recommendable to large language models. GEO covers structured data markup, third-party citation building, content restructuring for AI extraction, and technical signals like llms.txt and AI crawler access. But before you can improve, you need a baseline — which is exactly what this tool provides.

ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic) are two of the dominant AI assistants shaping this new search landscape. Your score across both is a fast, honest baseline of where you stand today.

How the AI Visibility Checker Works

1. Crawl your homepage. We perform a single read-only GET request to your homepage to identify your brand name, a short description of what you do, and your industry. No login required; no data is written to your site.
2. Classify your brand. An LLM reads your homepage and identifies your brand name, a one-sentence description, the top product topics, and a short list of direct competitors. This is the signal that drives the rest of the run.
3. Query AI platforms in parallel. We send a sample of industry-relevant buyer questions simultaneously to ChatGPT and Claude via their public APIs. Questions cover discovery, comparison, use-case, and recommendation scenarios buyers actually use.
4. Analyze responses and compute your score. We parse every response to detect brand mentions, position in lists, sentiment, and competitor co-occurrence. The results feed a weighted 0–100 score with six dimension breakdowns, plus a prioritized list of opportunities and recommendations.

How We Calculate Your Score

Your AI Visibility Score is a weighted composite of five factors, all measured against actual AI responses rather than proxies or estimates:

• Mention Rate (40%). The percentage of queries across all platforms where your brand appears by name in the response. This is the most direct signal of AI visibility and carries the heaviest weight.
• Platform Coverage (20%). How many AI platforms include your brand in at least one response. A brand that appears on both ChatGPT and Claude scores higher than one that appears on only one.
• Average Rank (20%). When your brand appears in a list or set of recommendations, where does it typically land? Position 1 scores best; position 5+ scores lower. First mention in a paragraph counts as rank 1.
• Sentiment (10%). Whether the context around your brand mention is positive, neutral, or negative. Most first mentions are neutral; active endorsement language lifts the score.
• Competitive Gap (10%). How your mention rate compares to the top competitor detected in the same responses. A brand mentioned half as often as its closest competitor scores lower than one that matches or leads.

Six dimension scores provide deeper diagnosis: Citation Readiness (how well your site signals credibility), Answer Alignment (how closely your content matches what AI answers actually say about your category), Platform Coverage, Sentiment, Competitor Gap, and List Rank. Each dimension points to a specific type of improvement.

Score bands: 0–39 Poor, 40–54 Fair, 55–69 Good, 70–84 Strong, 85–100 Excellent.

Honest Limitations

This tool gives you a fast, directional snapshot — not a statistically rigorous audit. A few things to keep in mind:

• API responses differ from consumer UI. When you use ChatGPT or Perplexity directly, your session context, browsing history, and personalization influence the response. API calls lack that context. Our scores reflect the baseline, unauthenticated behavior of each model.
• 8-prompt sample is directional. We run 8 prompts per check to stay fast and free. This is enough to surface strong patterns — a brand with a 0% mention rate is genuinely invisible — but individual results can vary. The paid Siftly platform runs hundreds of prompts for statistical confidence.
• Models update continuously. LLM training data and retrieval behavior change with every model update. A score from today may differ from one run in four weeks. Treat this as a snapshot, not a fixed ranking.
• Score is not absolute ground truth. Two brands with similar scores can have very different underlying patterns. Use the dimension breakdown and prompt-level results to understand the detail behind the number.

How to Improve Your AI Visibility

If your score is lower than you'd like, here are the highest-leverage actions to take, roughly in order of effort versus impact:

1. Add Organization and Product schema markup. Structured data gives AI systems a machine-readable signal about who you are, what you do, and how authoritative you are. Implement Organization, Product, and FAQPage schema on your most important pages.
2. Create an llms.txt file. An llms.txt file at your site root gives AI assistants a curated, model-readable map of your most important pages and what each one contains. Use our free llms.txt Generator to build one in under two minutes.
3. Verify AI crawler access.If AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot are blocked in your robots.txt, models can't index your content at all. Use our free AI Crawler Audit to check your current configuration.
4. Build third-party citations in authoritative sources. AI models heavily weight mentions in high-authority publications, industry reports, directories, and review sites. Guest content, analyst coverage, and press mentions in sources your buyers read are among the most powerful GEO signals.
5. Create comparison and listicle content for buyer-intent queries. Buyers ask AI for “best X for Y” and “X vs Y” queries. If your site has well-structured comparison pages that clearly name your category, your competitors, and your differentiators, models are more likely to surface and cite that content in recommendation responses.
6. Add FAQ schema to your key pages. FAQ schema signals to AI systems that your pages contain direct answers to common questions — exactly the content that gets cited in AI-generated answers. Prioritize your pricing, product, and category pages.

GEO is a compounding practice: each of these improvements reinforces the others. A site with clean schema, an llms.txt, open AI crawler access, and strong third-party citations will consistently outperform a site that does only one of these things.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an AI Visibility Check and how does it work?

We fetch your homepage to identify your brand and industry using a BAML LLM classifier, then send industry-relevant buyer questions to ChatGPT (GPT-4o mini) and Claude (Haiku 4.5). We parse each response to detect whether your brand is mentioned, in what position, and which competitors appear alongside or instead of you. The result is a 0–100 visibility score with per-platform breakdown.

Which AI assistants do you query, and how do you query them?

ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini) and Claude (claude-haiku-4-5). We use each provider's public API. Note: API responses approximate but don't exactly match what a logged-in user sees in the consumer UI — for that level of fidelity, see Siftly's paid platform, which monitors a broader set of AI assistants continuously.

How do you decide which questions to ask the AI?

An LLM classifies your homepage into a brand name, industry, top topics, and a short list of direct competitors. We then generate 30 buyer-intent questions tailored to that specific industry, topics, and competitor set — so a CRM company gets CRM questions, a QA testing platform gets testing questions, and a GEO platform gets AI-visibility questions. Questions cover four categories: discovery, comparison, use-case, and recommendation.

Why does my brand not appear in some AI answers?

Most AI assistants pull from public web content, structured data, and citation-rich pages. Common causes include weak structured data (Organization, Product schema), thin or no third-party mentions in authoritative sources, recent site changes the model hasn't indexed yet, or being too new for the model's training data window.

How do you score AI visibility?

0–100 weighted formula: mention rate across prompts and platforms (40%), platform coverage — how many platforms mention you (20%), average rank when appearing in a list (20%), sentiment around mentions (10%), and gap versus your top competitor (10%). Six dimension scores break this down further.

Is this the same as ChatGPT SEO or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

It's the diagnostic side of GEO. Once you know where you stand, the practical work — schema markup, citation building, content restructuring for AI extraction, llms.txt setup — improves your score over time. Try our free llms.txt Generator and AI Crawler Audit to start fixing your visibility gaps.

How is this free tool different from Siftly's paid platform?

Free runs use a sample of 8 prompts per run. Siftly's paid platform tracks hundreds of prompts continuously, monitors changes over time, alerts on visibility drops, and gives you live competitor and topic-level rankings updated daily. The free tool is a one-time snapshot; the paid platform is continuous monitoring.

Does running this audit change anything on my website?

No. We perform one read-only homepage GET to identify your brand, then send prompts to AI providers — we never crawl your pages deeply, write anything, or hit non-public endpoints. The audit happens on the AI providers' end.

Queries made to ChatGPT (Azure OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic) via their public APIs. Rate limits apply. Results are a directional sample — not a statistically representative audit.