Glossary
AI visibility
AI visibility is how findable, retrievable, and citable a brand or site is across AI surfaces — answer engines, chatbots, and the AI features inside search engines. It is the discipline's umbrella measure: citation share, brand mentions in answers, and AI referral traffic are all ways of counting it.
The metric family splits into first-party and third-party. First-party: the engines' own consoles — Bing Webmaster Tools reports AI citations directly, and Search Console reports impressions inside Google's AI features. Third-party: tools that sample queries at scale and record which brands and domains the engines surface. The two rarely agree precisely, and neither is wrong — they count different windows on the same behavior.
What makes AI visibility harder than classic rank tracking: it is engine-specific, model-sensitive (numbers move when the engine swaps its underlying model), and probabilistic — the same query can produce different answers on different runs. Visibility work in this discipline means moving a distribution, not holding a position.
Common questions
What is AI visibility?
How findable, retrievable, and citable a brand or site is across AI answer surfaces — measured through citation share, brand mentions in answers, and AI referral traffic.
How do I check my AI visibility on Bing?
Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report shows citations of your site across Microsoft Copilots and partners first-party, including Citation Share — in preview since June 2026.
What does the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools show?
Clicks and impressions from Microsoft's AI surfaces, extended in preview with Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare — Microsoft's move from AI traffic counts toward citation-level data.
Does Google Search Console report AI visibility?
Search Console reports impressions and clicks from Google's AI features through its generative-AI performance reports, but does not break out which pages an AI answer cited.
How do you measure AI visibility?
Start with the engines' own reports where they exist: Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report counts citations by page, and Search Console reports impressions in Google's AI features. For other engines, ask the questions your customers ask, in the app and more than once, because answers vary from run to run and tools that query the API can miss most citations — one study found Google results plus OpenAI's API recovered only about a quarter of the pages the ChatGPT app cited.
What is an AI visibility audit?
A structured check of where a brand shows up in AI answers and why: which questions surface it, which sources the engines cite instead, and whether the engines can reach those sources at all. That last step is new. On AEO Wire's panel of 52 major sites, publishers allow some engines' search bots and block others', so the outlets that cover a brand may be invisible to one engine and not another.
The record: Microsoft BingGoogle Search ConsoleAhrefsSemrush
See also: Citation shareAEOGEO