How we measure AI visibility
Most "AI visibility" claims can't survive a follow-up question. This page exists so ours can.
CONTENTS — The panel · The run · The metrics · The Third-Party Entity Footprint · What monitoring tools don't do · What we don't claim
The panel
A frozen set of 100 buyer questions per niche — category searches ("top startup CPA firms in the US"), situation searches ("best accounting firm for a Series A"), comparisons ("Kruze vs Pilot"), and service queries (R&D credits, 409A, ASC 606). Phrasing never changes between runs; that's what makes month-over-month movement a real measurement instead of an anecdote.
The run
Each question goes into a fresh, logged-out session — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI. Every firm named is logged with position. Perplexity and Google AI expose their citations; we log every cited URL. AI answers vary between sessions and locations — which is precisely why we measure with a fixed panel at fixed intervals and report trends, never single answers.
The metrics
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Mention share | % of panel questions where your firm is named. Directionally aligned with the Citation Share metric Bing Webmaster Tools now reports officially. |
| Citation share | % of AI-cited sources referencing your firm. |
| Competitor displacement | Your named competitors' rates, tracked against yours. |
| Source-footprint expansion | Count and quality of third-party pages referencing you. |
| Third-party profile consistency | Naming, service labels, credentials, and descriptions across the registries and platforms AI draws from. |
| Site quotability | Whether your own pages contain claims an AI can actually extract and repeat. |
The Third-Party Entity Footprint
AI assistants don't know your firm; they know what the internet says about it. For accounting, that internet has structure: the IRS's federal directory of credentialed preparers (which the IRS itself tells taxpayers to use), AICPA member verification, Clutch and G2 provider profiles with formal "outsourced accounting" and "fractional CFO" taxonomies, mainstream review platforms, and the editorial "best firms" lists AI quotes constantly. Auditing and correcting your presence across this stack is not hygiene — it's a direct input into the answers.
What monitoring tools don't do
$29–$500/month dashboards report your visibility score. They don't correct your directory profiles, don't pitch you into the listicles AI cites, don't restructure your site's copy into quotable claims, and don't interpret niche accounting queries. Measurement without execution is a scoreboard for a game you're not playing. We run all three layers: measurement, analysis, execution.
What we don't claim
No guaranteed placements. No promised traffic or lead counts. No claims that any specific platform will always name you. Published movement expectations: live-search platforms typically respond within ~2 months; ChatGPT and Gemini compound over 3–6. Reported monthly against the frozen panel, whether the news is good or not.
See the method applied to your firm
The free check runs five buyer questions from your niche and reports who gets named — including you or not.
Get the free check