What is AI search visibility, and how do you track share of voice?

When a buyer asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews "what tools do X", the engine writes one answer and names a few products. AI search visibility is whether yours is one of them. It splits into two measures: mention rate (how often the answer names your brand at all) and citation rate (how often it links your page as a source). A brand can be mentioned without being cited, and cited without being the recommendation.

This is not the same as your Google ranking. The page that ranks first for a search is often not the page an AI engine cites for the same question, so visibility in AI answers has to be measured on its own, not read off your search rank.

Share of voice is your brand’s citations divided by all the citations in your category, measured against a fixed set of competitors. If you track ten buyer questions and your brand is named in three of the answers while a rival is named in seven, your share of voice on that set is low and the rival’s is high. The number only means something when the question set and the competitor set stay the same from week to week.

1. Write the real questions your buyers ask before they buy, without your brand name in them, so you measure unaided visibility.
2. Run each question across the engines you care about (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, others), several times, because the same question gives different answers on different runs.
3. For each answer, record four things: were you named, were you linked, where in the answer you sat, and the tone.
4. Note the sources each engine cited, since those are the pages you compete with for the next answer.
5. Keep the question set and competitor set fixed, and compare the same set over weeks, so a change in the score is a real change and not a change in the test.

No package can promise a result. AI answers change between runs and between users, and no vendor controls what a model says. What a real programme does is measure your visibility honestly, show which questions you lose and to whom, and turn those gaps into work on your own pages and your presence in the lists and communities the engines read. The measuring is the product; the gains come from the work it points to.

Sealrep runs a set of your buyers’ questions across the AI engines in your plan, scores whether you are named and cited and how you compare with the competitors you choose, and turns the gaps into tasks. It does not promise rankings or citations. More: AI search visibility. For the cost of standalone trackers, read how much AI visibility tracking costs; to compare engines, read how to track brand mentions across AI engines.