How we measure AI visibility
Two questions, measured separately. Does AI know you exist, and does AI pick you when someone asks?
Across 7,794 judged answers, AI knew the business 93.1% of the time and recommended it 12.9% of the time.
That gap is the work. Here is how we count it.
GEO is our score for whether AI knows you exist. We ask engines about your category and count how often they can identify your business at all.
Pick Rate is our score for whether AI picks you. Same questions, different count: how often you are actually recommended, not just recognized.
They move independently. A business can score 100 on GEO and 1 on Pick Rate, which means AI knows exactly who you are and still sends the customer somewhere else.
AI knows who you are 93% of the time.
It recommends you 13% of the time.
Those are real numbers from 7,794 answers we checked by hand. Being known and being chosen are not the same thing, and the gap between them is the whole problem.
1,251 correct of 1,343 checked
833 of 6,451 checked
Pew Research, 900+ people tracked
How we measure it
Every day we put the same questions to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity for every business we work with. A second model then reads each answer and decides whether the business was genuinely named, rather than trusting the first model's word for it.
Almost everyone selling AI visibility measures whether AI knows you and reports it as though it answered whether AI picks you. Those are different numbers and they move for different reasons.
On the question a buyer actually asks
- Perplexity names the business 16.3% of the time (2,745 answers checked)
- Claude 10.8% (1,850 checked)
- ChatGPT 10.0% (1,856 checked)
We report these separately and never blend them into one score. A single averaged number hides which engine moved, and that is the easiest place to accidentally mislead someone.
Why being named is the whole game now
Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of more than 900 people for a month, covering 68,879 searches. When an AI summary appeared, only about 1 in 100 people clicked a link inside it. The click is largely gone. The mention is what is left. (Pew Research Center, 2025)
What actually raises it
A peer-reviewed study from Princeton, IIT Delhi, Georgia Tech and the Allen Institute for AI tested nine different ways of changing a page across 10,000 queries. Five of them worked. The top three lifted citation rate by 30 to 40 percent: cite your sources, quote real people, and put real numbers on the page. (KDD 2024)
Not one of the five is keyword matching. This page is built the way that study says to build one, which is also why it is full of numbers and citations instead of adjectives.
What these numbers are, and are not
- Measured across 5,444 AI crawler visits to 7 Kansas City websites over 39 days, on infrastructure we run.
- Aggregated. No individual business is identified.
- AI engines are not deterministic. The same question asked twice can answer differently, so single-day movement is noise, not a result.
- These are our accounts, not a random sample of Kansas City businesses.
- We measure whether AI names a business. We do not promise what happens after that, and anyone promising you phone calls from an AI answer is guessing.
We are currently running a 31-day study on two of these businesses, with the baseline and the predictions published before the results existed. Whatever it shows gets published, including if nothing moved.