> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.get-ryze.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# AI visibility

> AI visibility is how often and how prominently a brand appears in answers generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.

AI visibility is how often and how prominently a brand appears in answers generated by AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.

It is the AI-era counterpart to search rankings. Where rankings measure position in a list of links, AI visibility measures presence inside a written answer.

## The two components

AI visibility splits into two things that behave differently and are fixed differently.

**Mention** — the brand is named in the answer text. A mention can come from the model's training data, with no source page involved.

**Citation** — a specific URL is linked as a source. Citations come from live retrieval: the model searched, found a page, and used it.

The distinction matters because they have different causes. A brand can be mentioned without being cited (the model knows it, but did not read anything), or cited without being mentioned (a page was used as a source without the brand being named).

## Why the two split matters

* **Citations respond to content work.** Publishing clear, factual, retrievable pages changes what gets found and quoted. Timeline: weeks to months.
* **Mentions respond to presence.** Being named from memory depends on how strongly a brand is represented in training data — third-party coverage, reviews, forums, press. Timeline: many months, and not directly controllable.

A brand with strong mentions and no citations is well known but has nothing retrievable. A brand with citations and no mentions is retrievable but not yet established.

## How it is measured

AI visibility is measured by running a fixed set of representative buyer questions against answer engines on a schedule, then recording, for each run, whether the brand was mentioned, which URLs were cited, and which competitors appeared.

Because answer engines are volatile — the same question can return different sources on different days — a single run means very little. Meaningful measurement requires many queries, repeated over time, compared against a baseline.

## Related

* [Citation share](/concepts/citation-share)
* [Share of voice in AI](/concepts/share-of-voice-ai)
* [Generative engine optimization](/concepts/generative-engine-optimization)