Ignoring AI Visibility Could Be The Downfall of Your Website

AI visibility is the process of being mentioned or cited by online AI platforms and search engine features. This goes beyond Google’s well known AI Overviews and AI Mode, and includes other answer engines, such as:

• Perplexity
• ChatGPT
• Gemini

In an era where conversational AI queries dominate search and Google rankings are increasingly volatile, optimizing for alternative search engines and AI chatbots is the only way to stay ahead.

Not only does AI act as a spokesperson for your brand, but it can also have direct influence over product sales. Recent ecommerce-focused developments, such as PayPal and Perplexity’s partnership and Google’s agentic AI Mode features, mean that AI models can:

• Carry out product research
• Facilitate product purchases on a consumer’s behalf
• Call services and hospitality businesses and automatically book reservations based on user availability

It’s difficult to track some aspects of your website’s AI visibility with 100% accuracy, especially compared to traditional SEO keywords.

However, as analytics tools are improving their understanding of AI platforms better, the metrics on offer are expanding. When assessing your brand’s AI visibility, I recommend focusing on:

• Brand mentions: How frequently AI-generated responses speak about your brand
• Citations: How frequently your website is being linked in AI-generated responses
• The webpages citations point to: Which of your website pages do AI answers point to, and why?
• Visibility over time: Monitor your brand’s exposure in AI answers over time to spot and respond to trends
• Visibility by AI model: Shows which AI sources are most trusting of your brand
• Sentiment of mention: Understand whether the context surrounding mentions of your brand is positive, negative, or neutral

Tools To Use

While you can track AI Mode traffic in Google Search Console, the data is simply included in your overall traffic count, so you can’t analyze it separately.

To dig deeper into your website’s visibility in AI mode, and other AI platforms, I recommend the following tools:

• Profound: Tracks brand visibility across AI platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT
• Peec AI: Monitors prompts, benchmarks your visibility against competitors, and tracks historical changes
• Otterly: Researches and tracks prompts similarly to keyword research tools
• Wix’s AI Visibility Overview: Wix’s integrated tool allows you to track citations, visibility, brand sentiment, and measure against competitors

As AI continues to transform the search landscape, it’s clear that visibility AI search is extremely important for reaching new customers and securing sales.

While Google has provided some guidance on optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode, it’s still largely a learning process. Tracking where, when, and how your brand is mentioned in AI-generated answers is the best way to formulate a strategy that works for your business.

AI search will continue to evolve over time, so it’s important to get to grips with AI visibility tools now, regularly monitor your progress, and adapt quickly to trends and developments.