AI visibility

The method is to write a fixed set of benchmark questions, ask each AI provider those questions, and record whether the brand appears in each answer. Visibility is the number of answers in which the brand appears divided by the number of answers sampled. Questions should be unbranded, such as "which US airlines are the most reliable?" rather than "is Delta reliable?", because a branded question guarantees a mention.

Two further records make the number useful. Which domains each answer cited shows what the models relied on, and a breakdown by provider shows whether the brand appears in one assistant and not another. Visibility is a presence measure. It does not say how the brand was described, and describing tone requires separate analysis.

Variance is large. Live answers change between runs, and one brand moved from 40% to 30% to 70% across three runs of the same questions in PeakMetrics testing. Small samples make single numbers fragile, so AI visibility should be reported as a dated snapshot with its sample size, and repeated before it is treated as a trend.

PeakMetrics' AI Perceptions free check compares AI visibility with 30 days of press coverage from the PeakMetrics news index. Measured on 28 September 2026 with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok (25 sampled answers per sector; scope and caveats on the free check page), two patterns stand out.

First, press volume and AI visibility diverge. In the airlines sector, Alaska Airlines appeared in 14 of 25 sampled answers (56%) with 3,138 news mentions in 30 days. American Airlines appeared in 4 of 25 (16%) with 32,299 news mentions, about ten times as many. Delta Air Lines appeared in 20 of 25, with 13,994. Six airlines is a small set and one run is a single snapshot, so this shows that the measures can separate, not why.

Second, some brands with heavy coverage did not appear at all. Of the 59 brands measured across eight sectors, 4 appeared in none of the 25 answers sampled for their sector. Among them, Tesla had 28,673 news mentions, Starbucks 23,967 and Moderna 10,024 in the 30 days to 28 September 2026. A zero here means the brand was not named in those 25 answers to those category questions. It does not mean the brand is invisible to AI generally, and it says nothing about how any of these companies is regarded.

Provider differences are also visible. Delta appeared in 4 of 5 sampled ChatGPT answers but 3 of 5 Perplexity answers, which is why sampling one assistant can mislead.

AI visibility tells a team whether the brand is part of the answer when the public asks about its category. It complements media monitoring, which reports what was published, and is the outcome that generative engine optimization work targets. The cited domains show which publishers to prioritize, and include wire and newsroom content (see press release syndication).

AI visibility is not share of voice. Share of voice divides a fixed pool of mentions among competitors, whereas visibility counts appearances in sampled answers, and several brands can each be visible in the same answer. It is also not a favorability score, and it is not stable: treat it as a dated measurement. And the PeakMetrics AI Perception Score is a separate, defined metric in the paid product; the free check reports visibility only.