Methodology

How VisibilityIndex works

Methodology Version 1.0 Effective July 25, 2026

VisibilityIndex separates observed AI recommendation performance from website diagnostics. The AI Visibility Score measures where a selected business appears across successfully measured buyer-intent prompt and platform observations. The AI Readiness Scan evaluates website conditions that may be relevant to machine understanding, retrieval, corroboration, and actionability, but it does not increase or decrease the visibility score.

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1) What we measure

The free scan and the full audit are related, but they answer different questions.

Free scan

Structural readiness

The free scan checks identity clarity, service clarity, contact and location signals, structured data, trust signals, and basic extractability across a bounded set of pages.

Full AVI audit

Measured AI visibility

The full audit runs standardized buyer-intent prompt packs across supported AI systems. It records whether the selected business is returned in recommendation-style outputs, its ranked position, the supporting evidence, and measurement completeness for the run.

2) Attribution

A result only counts when it can be tied back to the selected business.

Hard match

Domain or website evidence

The strongest positive case is a direct website, domain, or citation match to the selected business.

Soft match

Name + location + context

If a direct domain match is missing, VisibilityIndex can still count a result when the surrounding identity context strongly aligns and does not conflict with a competitor. Ambiguous mentions do not count.

3) Score logic

The score is calculated directly from ranked outcomes across successfully measured prompt-platform observations.

Observation scoring

Each eligible result receives rank credit

For every standardized buyer-intent prompt on every enabled AI platform, VisibilityIndex records whether the selected business appears and where it ranks in the returned recommendation list.

Rank 1

1.00

Ranks 2–3

0.85

Ranks 4–5

0.60

Ranks 6–10

0.35

Not present

0.00

Final calculation

Average rank credit across eligible observations

AI Visibility Score = 100 × (Total Rank Credit ÷ Eligible Observations)

Eligible observations are prompt-platform measurements that completed successfully. Failed, rate-limited, or otherwise unmeasured observations are excluded rather than treated as business absences. The result is shown on a 0–100 scale and rounded to the nearest whole number for display.

Cross-platform interpretation

Consistency and prominent placement earn more credit

Every eligible prompt-platform observation uses the same rank-credit framework. A business returned prominently and consistently across several supported AI systems therefore earns more total credit than a business returned rarely or only on one platform.

No fixed market-share or provider-popularity weighting is applied to individual audit scoring. The public AI Visibility Index market pages separately offer an optional usage-weighted view alongside the primary ranking, described on those pages directly. That weighting policy is independent of the audit scoring described here.

Separate diagnostic layer

Website findings do not alter the score

AI Readiness findings, trust checks, crawler-access checks, structured-data findings, and other website diagnostics are reported separately. They inform the action plan, but they do not add points, subtract points, or otherwise change the AI Visibility Score.

4) Confidence

Confidence reflects measurement quality, not a promise of outcome.

What it means

Run quality

Confidence reflects attribution quality, channel measurement completeness, and how clean the evidence was inside the run.

What it does not mean

Not a business guarantee

Confidence is about measurement quality. It is not a guarantee of rankings, traffic, calls, leads, or revenue.

5) What the free scan checks

The readiness scan is deterministic and focused on a small set of high-signal pages.

Core checks

Business name, service category, and service area clarity
Phone, address, hours, and contact signals where applicable
Services, FAQ, pricing, reviews, and credentials signals
Organization or LocalBusiness structured data where applicable
Basic heading, list, and content-structure diagnostics

Trust checks

VisibilityIndex also checks a small set of trust and corroboration signals such as obvious crawler blocking, review-platform presence, and optional helper files like /llms.txt. These are supporting signals, not guarantees of recommendation.

6) Limits

Clear boundaries keep the methodology honest.

Important limits

VisibilityIndex does not guarantee traffic, rankings, calls, or revenue.
AI outputs can vary over time, by platform, by account state, and by prompt wording.
A strong readiness scan does not guarantee recommendation inclusion.
Optional files like /llms.txt are helper signals, not an AI passport.

In short

The free scan checks whether your website is easy for AI systems to read and trust. The full audit checks whether AI systems actually recommend your business when someone searches. These are two different things, and we report them separately.