How AI visibility actually gets measured
Every article runs on real scan data (including our own bad numbers), and each one comes with a companion film that shows the same numbers moving. No “future of search” essays.
How to Check Whether AI Models Mention Your Brand: A 15-Answer Walkthrough
A real scan, start to finish: five buyer questions, three grounded models, fifteen answers, and what the resulting 26.7% presence rate actually licenses you to say.
AI Visibility Score: Rebuilding a Real 31/100 by Hand
Six weighted components, three per-engine scores, one blend. We take a real score of 31 apart to the last decimal and show which component is quietly costing the most.
How Many Prompts Do You Actually Need to Measure AI Visibility?
The margin of error is 0.98 ÷ √(prompts × models × runs). That one formula settles most arguments about prompt-set size, including why 97 runs of one prompt is a waste.
AI Recommendations Change Almost Every Time You Ask. Track This Instead.
Temperature zero does not make a model deterministic. Here is what actually causes the churn, what the 2026 studies measured, and which four numbers survive it.
Share of Voice in AI Answers: 19% or 40%? The Denominator Decides
One scan, two legitimate Share of Voice figures, 19.0% and 40.0%, separated only by which brands you count. Why we publish the smaller one.
Mention vs Citation: Why 62% of Your AI Citations Never Say Your Name
Being named and being linked are different events with different causes. A brand named in 26.7% of answers held 3.2% of the citations in the same scan.
When Your AI Visibility Tool Is Tracking the Wrong Brand
A tool once reported 30 mentions that were 28 references to a fictional character. Here is the gate that prevents it, and the six real mentions our own scan threw away to keep it.
Is llms.txt Worth Shipping in 2026? What 137,000 Sites Showed
Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files get zero AI-crawler traffic and no major engine has confirmed reading one. The file still has exactly one job worth doing.
Blocking GPTBot Does Nothing to ChatGPT Search. Check the Other Token.
Training crawlers, search indexers, user-fetchers and control tokens are four different things sharing one file. Confusing them is how sites disappear from AI answers by accident.
What One AI Visibility Scan Actually Costs: $2.14 for 15 Answers
Real per-answer costs from a real scan: 26.5¢ on GPT-5.5, 5.4¢ on Gemini. The engine that cost five times more scored four times lower.