Mentions, citations and why both matter
An AI answer can feature you in two ways. A mention is your brand or product named in the text of the answer. A citation is a link to one of your pages, listed as a source. Mentions build awareness; citations bring visits and show which of your pages the engine trusts.
The two often come apart. You can be cited without being mentioned, when your guide serves as a source while the answer recommends a competitor. You can be mentioned without being cited, which usually means the engine knows your brand from other sites: reviews, comparisons, forums.
Choose the questions to track
Track questions, not keywords. People ask AI answer engines full questions, such as “what’s the best way to transcribe a podcast in French?”, and the answer depends on the wording. Start with 20 to 50 questions your customers really ask, taken from support tickets, sales calls and the related questions shown in search results.
Cover the whole journey: problem questions (“why does my podcast sound echoey?”), solution questions (“how do I remove echo from audio?”) and comparison questions (“what are the best tools to clean up podcast audio?”). Comparison questions are where brands get named.
Ask in each market’s language. An answer in German draws on German sources, and your English guide will not help there.
How the measurement works
Each tracked question is asked to five AI answer engines, in each of your markets, every day. For every answer, the tracker records whether your brand is mentioned, which of your pages are cited, and which other domains are cited alongside you.
Answers vary from one run to the next, even for the same question. That is why visibility is measured as a share, the percentage of answers over the last seven days that mention or cite you, rather than as a single yes or no.
Share of AI answers is your headline figure, for example cited in 12 of 35 answers this week. Follow it per engine and per market, because each engine draws on different sources.
Improve the pages engines draw from
Answer engines favor pages that answer a question directly and can be quoted cleanly: the answer in the first lines, short sections under descriptive headings, specific figures and steps, and a visible date of last update.
Study the pages cited instead of yours for your key questions. They often have something yours lacks, such as a comparison table, a clear definition or an up-to-date figure. Close that gap on your existing page rather than writing a new one.
Make sure engines can read your pages: content in the HTML rather than loaded by scripts, nothing important behind a login, and a robots.txt that does not block the crawlers you want. Structured data helps engines understand what each page is about.
Report it alongside your rankings
AI visibility does not replace rankings; it sits next to them. A page can rank first and never be cited, or be cited often while ranking on page two. Reporting both shows the full picture of how people find you.
Review weekly rather than daily. Look for questions where you lost citations, new domains appearing in answers and engines where you are absent. Share a short monthly summary with your team: the three questions you won and the three to work on next.
Frequently asked questions
Which AI answer engines are tracked?
Five major AI answer engines, in each of your markets. The list evolves with the landscape, and the current one is shown in your project settings.
Can I see the full AI answer?
Yes. Every tracked answer is saved with its text, the sources it cites and the date, so you can see exactly how your brand was described.
How is AI visibility different from rankings?
Rankings tell you where a page appears in a list of results. AI visibility tells you whether an engine’s written answer mentions your brand or cites your pages. You need both to see how people find you.
