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by The Notified Team on Sep 14, 2026, 12:00:01 PM
AI visibility is not a one-off search or one neat score. Learn how to build a practical benchmark, analyze the citations shaping your brand and turn the findings into a report leadership can use.
For years, marketers had a fairly straightforward way to understand search performance. Rankings, clicks, impressions and traffic helped tell the story. AI search has made that picture a lot less clear.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or another AI assistant a question, they are not presented with a page of links. They receive an answer pieced together from multiple sources, some you own and some you do not.
Any communications team writing today knows that is a meaningful shift. It is no longer enough to know whether people can find your content. You also need to understand whether AI systems can find it, whether they trust it and, at the very least, whether they are talking about you at all.
So, how do we measure success in AI search? Naturally, executive leadership teams, clients and other stakeholders want a simple answer. Ideally, it would be a single score that fits neatly into a dashboard.
Unfortunately, one number cannot paint a complete picture of AI’s impact on your brand story. It will not tell you whether your company is being represented accurately, which sources are influencing the narrative or why a competitor appears when you do not.
In a recent webinar produced in partnership with MarketingProfs, Brittany Brady of Notified, Rotem Hinkis of APCO and Mirza Germovic of Edelman broke down the new rules of AI visibility measurement and what communications teams should look for in their reporting.
So, How Do You Measure AI Search Visibility?
One-off searches can give you a quick sense of how an AI platform talks about your company, but they are not a reliable measurement program.
AI-generated answers can change from one search to the next and from one user to another. What you see may not be what your boss sees, and neither of you may get the same answer as your neighbor.
If an executive enters one prompt, does not see the company mentioned and sounds the alarm, that is not a visibility analysis. Finding the brand in one favorable answer and declaring victory is not much better.
Start with a fixed set of prompts based on questions your stakeholders might actually ask. A practical starter set could include:
- Five branded prompts, such as “What does [brand] do?” or “What is [brand] known for?”
- Five category prompts about the markets, services or problems your company addresses
- Five comparison prompts involving priority competitors
- Five consideration prompts a buyer might ask while evaluating a solution
- Five reputation prompts about expertise, trust, leadership or known concerns
Avoid writing prompts in polished brand language. Use the words your customers, journalists, investors and other stakeholders would use. Run the same prompts across the AI platforms those audiences are most likely to use.
Monthly tracking will work for many teams, although a launch, rebrand, acquisition or emerging reputation issue may justify more frequent checks.
For each answer, record five things:
- Is the brand included?
- How prominently does it appear?
- How is it described?
- What sources are cited?
- Which competitors are mentioned?
This will not produce a universal score, but it will give you something more useful: a baseline you can compare against.
The goal is not to appear in every answer. What matters is whether visibility is moving in the right direction, whether competitors are gaining ground in categories you care about and whether AI platforms are connecting your company to the messages you want to own.
Need ideas to get started? Get our free AI content guide, which includes more than 30 prompts to help you assess your AI brand narrative and begin building an AEO program.
Measure What AI Is Saying About Your Brand
See how communications leaders are benchmarking AI visibility, analyzing citations and strengthening the content behind the citations.
AI Citations Tell You Why You’re Visible
If an answer audit tells you where you are showing up, citations can help explain why.
For communicators, this is where AI visibility becomes especially useful. Looking at cited sources can show you which content is gaining traction, what is being overlooked and where an outdated narrative may still be hanging around.
Start by sorting citations into a few simple categories: owned content, earned media, independent reference sources and competitor content. Then look for patterns.
Which of your assets appear across several prompts? Which publications keep reinforcing a competitor’s position? Are AI systems relying on an old webpage or an outdated description of your company? Are they missing a message that matters to the business?
Those findings give your team something to act on. If a competitor is repeatedly mentioned in answers about innovation or industry expertise, look at the sources supporting that association. They may have original research attracting citations, coverage in an influential group of trade publications or simply a clearer explanation on their own site.
That turns a competitive gap into a content or media-relations brief instead of another red number in a report.
Press releases deserve a closer look, too. During the webinar, Rotem Hinkis shared an example of a release that appeared unsuccessful based on traditional pickup but performed well in AI results. She also described an analysis in which releases mentioning an executive in the headline or opening paragraphs surfaced more often than releases that introduced the executive farther down.
Tools such as Notified’s AI citation reporting can help teams measure the longer-term impact of their press releases and identify which announcements continue to appear in AI-generated answers.
That does not mean pickup, reach and referral traffic no longer matter. It means a release can continue working for you long after it hits the wire. A clear, factual announcement may become one of the sources AI systems use to answer future questions about your company, leadership or expertise.
What Should an AI Visibility Report Include?
Let’s get down to brass tacks: What does the report actually look like?
If platforms such as Notified’s GlobeNewswire Analytics are out of reach, a spreadsheet can still give you a workable starting point.
Use the following prompt with your preferred AI assistant to create a measurement matrix:
Create an AI search visibility tracking spreadsheet for a communications team. Include columns for review date, AI platform, prompt category, exact prompt, brand mentioned, prominence in answer, brand description, sentiment or framing, cited source, source type, competitor mentions, factual accuracy, messaging alignment, risk level, recommended action and reviewer notes. Use dropdown-ready values where appropriate. Add a second tab summarizing visibility rate by prompt category, platform and competitor, along with top-cited owned and earned sources. Do not populate the tracker with sample results.
Treat the resulting spreadsheet as a departmental working document. Keep the prompt-level responses, source URLs, observations and follow-up actions there so the team can investigate changes and maintain a clear record over time.
Leadership, however, is usually looking for the “so what” of it all: What does this mean, and what should we do next?
Ideally, your executive AI visibility report should be no more than one page and include:
- Trends: Summarize visibility across your fixed prompt set and compare it with two or three priority competitors.
- Drivers: Identify the content and coverage most closely associated with gains or losses.
- Narrative checks: Note how AI systems describe the brand and whether that description matches current messaging.
- Risks: Call out factual inaccuracies, outdated sources or recurring negative themes.
- Recommendations: Connect the findings to a specific content, media, website or measurement action.
Keep it concise and focused on decisions. AI-generated results can change quickly, so monthly reporting is a sensible baseline for monitoring the health of your program. More frequent reporting may be appropriate around major announcements or reputation issues.
Bottom Line: Measure First, Then Optimize
It is tempting to jump straight to optimization. How do we appear in more answers? How do we earn more citations? How do we get AI systems to associate our company with the right topics?
Those are fair questions, but they are hard to answer until you know where you stand.
You do not need a perfect score or an elaborate measurement model to begin. Start with a sensible set of prompts, run them consistently and pay attention to the sources shaping the answers. From there, you can see what is working, where competitors have an edge and which parts of your brand narrative need reinforcement.
That is when AI visibility becomes more than another dashboard number. It becomes intelligence your communications team can actually use.
For more expert advice on AEO and AI visibility measurement, watch AI Search Visibility Benchmarks: What to Measure, Track & Report on demand. The webinar features communications and AI measurement perspectives from Notified, APCO and Edelman.
About Notified
Notified, Equiniti’s market engagement business, helps public relations and investor relations professionals earn attention, measure engagement and deliver results through its integrated platforms Content OS™ and IR Hub™. Click here to learn why more than 50% of the S&P 500 trust Notified’s solutions and services to drive demand and attract capital.
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