An AI visibility score measures how often and how favorably AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) mention your brand when someone asks a question in your category. The score runs from 0 (never mentioned) to 100 (consistently the top recommendation across engines and prompts).
We built Be Recommended to generate this score. Be Recommended is an AI visibility tool that scores how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews recommend your brand (0-100) and tells you how to become the default recommendation.
This post explains what the score means, how it's calculated, and where it breaks down.
Why Google ranking alone stopped telling the full story
Roughly 90% of sources ChatGPT cites come from outside the Google top 20 results. A page sitting at position 3 in Google can be invisible to ChatGPT. A page Google barely indexes can show up as the first AI recommendation.
This gap keeps growing. More people ask AI assistants directly instead of typing into a search bar. If your brand shows up in Google but not in AI responses, you're missing a channel that grows every quarter.
How the score is calculated
Be Recommended runs 50+ real prompts across five AI engines. These are the kind of questions your potential customers actually type. For each prompt, it checks:
- Whether your brand appears in the response at all
- Where it appears (first mention vs. buried in a list)
- How it's described (recommended, mentioned neutrally, or mentioned with caveats)
- How you compare to competitors in the same response
The composite score weights these signals into a single 0-100 number. A per-engine breakdown ships alongside it so you can see where you're strong and where you're absent.
| Score range | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0-15 | AI assistants don't know your brand exists in this category |
| 16-35 | Occasional mentions, usually buried in lists. The average company lands here (~31) |
| 36-60 | Regular mentions across some engines. On the map but not the default |
| 61-80 | Frequent, favorable mentions. Competitors see you in their reports too |
| 81-100 | Consistent top recommendation. You own the category in AI responses |
The average company we've scored lands around 31. The top performers push past 80.
What the score does not tell you
The score reflects a snapshot. AI models update their training data and retrieval pipelines on their own schedule, so a score from January may not match March. Be Recommended measures the current state, not next month's.
It also doesn't cover paid placements. If an AI engine starts selling sponsored positions (some are experimenting), those would need separate tracking.
And the score is category-specific. A brand can score 70 for "project management tool" and 12 for "collaboration software" depending on how AI models segment the space.
FAQ
What is an AI visibility score?
A number from 0 to 100 that measures how consistently AI assistants recommend your brand when users ask about your category. Higher means more frequent, more favorable mentions across more engines.
How is it different from SEO ranking?
SEO ranking tracks your position in Google's organic results. AI visibility tracks whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews mention you at all. About 90% of what ChatGPT cites sits outside Google's top 20, so the two metrics measure different things.
Which AI engines does Be Recommended check?
Five: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
How many prompts are tested?
50+ per report, modeled on real queries your audience would use. Not synthetic keyword variations. Actual questions.
What's a good score?
The average sits around 31. Above 60 means AI assistants mention you regularly. Above 80 means you're the default recommendation in your category for most engines.
What do I do with the score?
Each report includes a prioritized action plan: which content to create, which citations to build, which engines to focus on first. The score tells you where you stand. The plan tells you what to change.
Does the score update automatically?
Each report is a point-in-time measurement. Run it again after making changes to see movement.
When to check your AI visibility
If you're investing in content marketing or SEO and haven't measured your AI visibility separately, you're working with partial data. The channels are different enough that a strong Google presence doesn't guarantee AI presence, and the reverse is also true.
Run a report at berecommended.com.
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