Ask three AI-visibility tools how visible your brand is and you will get three different numbers — none of which you can reproduce next week. That is not measurement. It is marketing.
Nearly every agency now sells “AI visibility,” and almost none will tell you how they measure it. You get a single score — blended across engines, prompts, and time — and you are asked to trust it. But a blended score is exactly where the truth goes to hide.
The composite score is the problem
The six major AI surfaces behave differently. A brand can be well cited on Perplexity, invisible on Gemini, and inconsistent on ChatGPT. Average those into one number and you have erased the only information that matters: where you are winning and where you are absent. A composite lets an agency quietly average away the surfaces you are losing on. It is not a summary; it is a place to hide.
The Six-Surface Standard
We measure six surfaces, weight them equally, and report each one on its own: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Claude. The method is public on purpose:
- At least three depersonalized samples per query, so a one-off answer never becomes a headline number.
- Invalid runs discarded — a result returned without a live web search is thrown out, not counted.
- No composite score. Ever. Every engine is reported separately.
- No surface reported as zero without manual confirmation that month.
- First-party ground truth from GA4 and Google Search Console — never an estimator's modeled traffic.
Why we publish it
A standard you keep secret is just another black box. Publishing the method does two things: it lets you hold us accountable to it, and it forces every “AI score” you are shown elsewhere to be measured against a real definition of the word. We would rather compete on a standard than on a number nobody can check.
What it means for you
You get an honest baseline — per engine, on the prompts your buyers actually ask — then the work to move it, and receipts every month proving what changed. What you will not get is a guarantee: the vendors themselves state there is no way to guarantee placement in an AI answer, and we cite them when we hold that line. We sell visibility and measurement, done honestly. The number means something because you can reproduce it.
