AI visibility tracking: what the number means
An AI visibility score is a share of answers, not a rank. What has to be true for it to be trustworthy, why the prompt set decides everything, and how to read a change in it.
An AI visibility number is a share: on a fixed set of questions, the proportion of answers that cite you. It is not a rank, it has no ceiling of one, and it only means anything if the question set stays still.
Why does the prompt set decide everything?
Because the number is a share of those questions and nothing else. Change the questions and the score changes without anything about your site changing at all.
That is why prompts should come from your own search data rather than from imagination. Long conversational queries in Search Console are the closest evidence you have of what people actually ask.
What counts as a citation?
A link to your domain in the sources behind the answer. That is the strict definition and the one worth holding to.
Being named in the prose without a link is a mention. Track it, keep it on its own line, and never add the two together to make the headline look better.
How much movement is real?
Less than people assume at small sample sizes. Six questions across four engines is 24 answers, so one extra citation moves the share by about four points.
Treat small swings as noise unless they persist across runs. Repeating each prompt more than once per engine and discarding unstable results is the honest fix.
Can Search Console tell me this?
No. Google folds AI Overview impressions into ordinary web totals and offers no filter for them, so any AI visibility figure derived from Search Console is an estimate.
The two honest routes are asking the engines directly and reading server logs for crawler access.
Questions
What is a good AI visibility score?
It depends entirely on the question set, which is why cross-company comparisons are meaningless. The useful comparison is against your own previous run and against the competitors named in the same answers.
Why did my score drop with no changes?
Usually the engine changed, not you. Retrieval and model updates ship without notice, which is the argument for tracking continuously rather than auditing once a quarter.
Should I track competitors too?
Yes. Who gets named instead of you is more actionable than your own number, because it tells you which pages the engines currently trust on your topic.
Find out where you stand on your own domain: the free AI visibility check asks all four engines about you, and the content scorer scores any page against the published rubric. Neither needs an account. The full background is what answer engine optimization is.