GLOSSARY

AI Visibility

IN ONE SENTENCE

AI visibility is made up of four separately measurable parts — appearance, description, recommendation and support. Reporting only appearance flattens three different situations into one percentage.

AI visibility is the degree to which a brand appears, gets described and gets recommended inside generative AI answers. In traditional search, visibility roughly equals list position. A generative answer returns a conclusion that users often read on its own, so the answerable questions become whether the brand appears in it, how it is described, whether it is recommended, and what the answer rests on.

OUR POSITION

Any AI visibility percentage needs four declarations to be usable: question set, platforms, market and language, and period and sampling. Missing one, it cannot be compared with anything else.

01

In detail

The four parts: appearance (share of a fixed question set that mentions the brand), description (how far the mention extends), recommendation (neutral listing, conditional suggestion or clear first choice), and support (which sources the answer cites). The full five-dimension breakdown is in VDRCA.

⚠️ Daily-average and cumulative figures are not interchangeable. Over a long enough window, 'mentioned at least once' approaches 100% for most brands and cumulative coverage loses its discriminating power, so published figures use daily averages.

⚠️ Citation source structure in Chinese AI search differs entirely from the English ecosystem. Weights need separate per-platform measurement; porting English conclusions over produces wrong judgements.

Data behind this page

40.1% / 26.3% / 23.5%

English AI answer citation share (Reddit / Wikipedia / YouTube)

Source：Semrush, 150,000+ citations / 5,000 keywords，2025-06

8%

Click rate on traditional results with an AI summary present (15% without)

Source：Pew Research Center, 900 US adults / 68,879 searches，2025-07

Sources

  1. [1]AI answer citation source distribution (150,000+ citations / 5,000 keywords)．Semrush．2025-06
  2. [2]Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears．Pew Research Center．2025-07-22

Updated 2026-08-10