How to measure AI visibility: mentions, citations and share of voice
Search Console doesn’t report your presence in AI answers. Here’s how to measure it with a fixed question set, three core metrics and a weekly cadence.
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Search Console shows where you stand on Google: impressions, clicks, average position. There’s no equivalent report for AI answers. Google counts AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic inside regular web search data, and ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity give site owners no visibility reporting at all.
That leaves one reliable method: pick the questions your buyers ask, run them on the same platforms at regular intervals and log the answers. This guide shows how to set that up, by hand or with a tool.
Build the question set in your buyers’ words.
Twenty to fifty prompts is a good start. Split them into three types: informational (“How much RAM does a business laptop need?”), comparison (“Laptops or desktops for an office team?”) and purchase-ready (“Which suppliers sell business laptops in bulk in Chicago?”). Visits and sales come mostly from the last group.
Write prompts the way someone would type them into a chat, not as keywords. Keep the set fixed; if the questions change every week, the weeks can’t be compared.
Track three metrics.
Once you’ve logged an answer for each question and platform, calculate three ratios. The table shows an example week with 40 prompts.
- Mention rate shows whether your brand comes to mind at all.
- Citation rate shows the visibility that can actually send visitors. It’s the metric that matters most.
- Share of voice shows where you stand against competitors on the same questions.
| Metric | How to calculate it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Mention rate | Answers that name your brand ÷ total answers | 12 / 40 = 30% |
| Citation rate | Answers that link to your site ÷ total answers | 7 / 40 = 17.5% |
| Share of voice | Your mentions ÷ total mentions of all brands in the answers | 12 / 50 = 24% |
Measure each platform separately.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on different sources and link out at different rates. Perplexity cites sources in almost every answer, for example, while a chat assistant may only link when it runs a search. Rolling everything into one score hides where you’re strong and where you’re missing.
Keep conditions as neutral as possible: logged out, or on an account with history and personalization off, in your target country and language. Log every answer with the date, platform, prompt and cited URLs.
Repeat weekly. Never trust a single answer.
The same prompt asked twice on the same day can come back with different sources. A single screenshot proving that “ChatGPT recommends us” or “ChatGPT forgot us” tells you very little. Run the same set the same way every week and read the four-to-eight-week trend.
Note the date whenever you change a page. That lets you connect any later rise or drop in citations to the change.
Measure the traffic too.
Visibility pays off as visits. In Google Analytics 4, group referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com into their own channel. ChatGPT usually adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it shows, which makes those sessions easy to isolate. Clicks from Google’s AI features, by contrast, stay mixed into regular search data in Search Console.
Automating the measurement.
By hand, 40 prompts across five platforms means 200 answers to log every week. Marvedo’s AI visibility module runs prompts chosen for your site on Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity every week, counts mentions and citations separately, and shows the competitors named instead of you and the weekly trend in one table.
This guide was prepared with AI assistance using official sources. Examples are not customer results and do not promise performance improvements.