# What is AI visibility? How often AI answers name your brand

> In short: AI visibility is how often AI assistants name your brand, and cite your pages, when people ask the questions you care about. It's a rate over many answers on each assistant, not a single check, and it's worth more on buying questions than on fact questions.

Definition from Keats, published 2026-11-12, updated 2026-11-12. Canonical: https://getkeats.com/glossary/ai-visibility

AI visibility is the share of AI answers, to the questions your buyers ask, that mention your brand or link to your pages. If ChatGPT is asked "which SIE prep course should I take" thirty times and names you in twelve of those answers, your visibility on that question in ChatGPT is 40%.

The phrase is mostly used by tools: "ai visibility tool" has about 3,900 US searches a month (Ahrefs, read 2026-11-12). It's the outcome that [AEO](https://getkeats.com/glossary/aeo) works on.

Three things make it useful rather than vague:

- **It's per question and per assistant.** You can be named on every Perplexity answer and missing from Gemini. An average across assistants hides that.
- **It distinguishes named from cited.** Being [named first](https://getkeats.com/glossary/named-first) on a buying question is what wins customers; being cited on a fact question is what makes you the source.
- **It needs many answers.** One answer is a sample. Several per question per week, with a noise band, make a rate you can track.

Rolled up, weighted so buying questions count most, it becomes a single [AI visibility score](https://getkeats.com/glossary/ai-visibility-score). In Keats it's the first line of each offering's weekly read.


## Sources

- [Keats: US search volume and difficulty for 40 AEO terms (CSV, from Ahrefs)](https://getkeats.com/data/aeo-keywords-2026-11-12.csv), read 2026-11-12