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Measuring visibility

Visibility score

One number per brand, how it is calculated, and when we refuse to show it.

Visibility answers: of all the times we asked, how often did the answer name you?

The calculation

It is deliberately boring:

visibility = brand mentioned in N answers / N answers we got back

A cell is one prompt on one engine. If you track 100 prompts across five engines, one scan intends 500 cells. If your brand was named in 140 of the answers that came back, visibility is 28%.

The same formula runs per engine, which is where it gets useful. A brand at 28% overall is often 60% on Perplexity and 4% on ChatGPT, and those two numbers imply completely different work.

Why the number is sometimes missing

Engines fail. A provider rate-limits, an API key lapses, a scraper hits a wall. When that happens, some cells never come back, and a percentage computed over the survivors stops describing your brand and starts describing whichever cells happened to succeed.

Three cells out of thirty, with the brand in all three, is 100%. That figure is worthless and would be read as triumph.

So:

  • Below half the intended cells, the headline percentage is reported as unknown rather than shown. Not zero. Unknown.
  • Above half, it is shown together with the shortfall, so you can see the measurement was partial.
  • A run where every engine dropped is unknown, never 0%. “The brand appears nowhere” and “we could not look” are different claims.

Runs recorded before this rule existed carry no completeness figure, and we leave them alone rather than inventing one retroactively.

What moves it

Visibility moves for three reasons, and telling them apart is most of the work:

  1. You changed: new content, new citations, a page that finally got crawled.
  2. A competitor changed: someone else got cited more and crowded you out.
  3. The engine changed: a model update, a retrieval change, a different default search behaviour.

The third is real and more common than people expect. That is why the change feed reports movement across all tracked brands at once: when every brand in a market moves the same direction on the same day, that is the engine, not you.