AI & classic search visibility: What it is and how to improve it with SE Ranking
Today, whether you’re a site owner or an SEO expert, keeping a watchful eye on your website’s and brand visibility is an absolute must. Doing so can help you gauge how effective your overall efforts are and avoid a disaster. As a rule of thumb, the higher the visibility score, the better.
So, how can you find out what your site’s visibility score is, and what factors can impact it? Let’s take a closer look to find out.
What is search visibility?
Search visibility is the share of impressions a website gets for a given query, across the channels your audience uses to find information. Traditionally, that meant search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Today, it also means AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity.
In classic search, visibility tells you what percentage of users are likely to see your site after entering specific queries into a search box. AI visibility works differently. Instead of ranking links by position, it shows how often your brand gets mentioned, or your website gets cited, when AI tools answer questions relevant to your business.
Both types of visibility matter, but they measure different things. A brand can have strong search visibility and no presence in LLMs, and vice versa. But the higher your visibility across both channels, the more likely you are to attract traffic, build brand awareness, and generate leads. So, for a complete picture, you need to track both. And let’s not forget the social media role. It adds an additional layer to your overall brand’s visibility and creates an ecosystem-level view.
To find out what other digital marketing metrics are tracked in SE Ranking, make sure to go through this article.
What is the purpose of visibility analysis?
At its core, search visibility is about measuring the effectiveness of your optimization efforts.
For classic search, visibility tracking helps you understand how well your pages rank for targeted keywords in search engines, where you’re losing ground to competitors, and which parts of your site need optimization. For AI search, it tells you whether your brand is being recommended, cited, or omitted when AI platforms respond to queries your potential customers are asking.
Comparing your site’s visibility to that of your competitors, in both search engines and AI platforms, helps you understand why your website’s position in the market is where it is and clears the path for you to develop strategies to improve it. You can spot which topics or queries your rivals are winning on, understand what content or positioning is earning them mentions in AI responses, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Monitoring visibility over time is also how you catch drops early. A sudden dip in Google visibility could signal a rankings issue, an algorithm update, or a technical problem. A drop in AI visibility might mean a competitor has overtaken or that LLMs have changed their behavior. Either way, the data gives you something to act on.
How is search visibility calculated in SE Ranking?
With SE Ranking, you can check your website’s SEO visibility in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even YouTube.
For example, let’s say you’ve added a website project to our SEO platform and specified the keywords you’ll use to track its performance. Hypothetically, some of the keywords might have helped your site reach the top 3 search results, while the rest weren’t as successful and could only get your site to the top 10 or 20 at best. SE Ranking’s system uses a unique algorithm that assigns a different number of points to each search query depending on the site’s SERP position.
The rule is simple: the higher the ranking, the higher the score. On top of that, our system also considers the query’s search volume where the same rule applies: the higher the search volume, the higher the score.
The points awarded to each query are then inserted into a special formula that calculates the site’s current visibility on Google (or another search engine included in the project). Here’s what the formula looks like:
where
S is the search engine visibility;
F is the search volume;
A is the adjusting ranking factor.
The adjusting factor is determined depending on the keyword position your website gains in a search engine based on a certain search volume:Top 3 positions: A=1;
4th position: A=0,85;
5th position: A=0,60;
6, 7 positions: A=0,50;
8, 9 positions: A=0,30;
10th position: A=0,2;
11th position and so on: A=0.
To put it plainly, you want your site to strive for higher visibility and steer far from 0%.
Keyword and keyword group search visibility
In addition to tracking website search visibility, you can also track the search visibility of specific keywords and keyword groups. By getting a keyword visibility score, you can determine the percentage of impressions a particular keyword gets in organic search results. Like website visibility, you can track keyword visibility across all the search engines included in your project.
Keyword group search visibility is calculated using the same formula as website search visibility, as described above. For separate keywords, the formula is about as straightforward as it gets.
S=A*100%
The meaning of the letter is the same as described above: S stands for search engine visibility and A is the adjusting ranking factor.
How is AI visibility calculated?
AI visibility tells you how present your brand is in AI responses. It’s about whether your brand gets mentioned or linked to when an LLM answers a user question, where those mentions or links are placed, and how you stand up against your competitors. With SE Ranking, you can track visibility across systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Perplexity.
SE Ranking shows several crucial metrics to better understand your AI search visibility.
Mention & link presence
Mention & link presence shows how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses across the prompts you track.
The metric breaks down into two distinct shares:
- For mentions, the share is calculated against all tracked prompts.
- For links, the share is calculated against only the prompts where the AI platform provided source links at all (since not every response includes citations).
Tracking both gives you a clearer picture of where you stand. A brand can be mentioned frequently but rarely linked, or linked consistently but only in passing.
SE Ranking calculates these shares as of the last day of the selected period, with changes shown in percentage points compared to the first day. This makes it easy to spot trends and measure the impact of your efforts over time.
On top of that, SE Ranking shows how often your brand or website shows up in the top 3 positions within AI answers. The earlier you appear in an AI-generated answer text, the more likely you are to be seen and clicked by a reader.
Mention rate
Another part of the AI visibility equation is to look at your presence in sources cited by LLMs. For this, you can use the mention rate metric. It’s the percentage of source pages used in AI responses where your brand appears either as a linked citation or an unlinked reference.
Where mention & link presence looks at the prompt level (how many queries surface your brand), mention rate looks at the source level: how often your content is part of the pool the AI draws from when forming its answer.
What is a good visibility score?
The higher your visibility score, the more likely you are to attract traffic, build brand awareness, and generate leads. But what counts as “good” depends on which type of visibility you’re looking at.
For classic search visibility, it’s almost impossible to achieve a 100% search visibility score. It would require your website to rank number one for all the keywords you track, including non-branded ones. Also, search algorithms are constantly evolving, and competitors are always optimizing, so such a level of ranking is unrealistic.
AI visibility works differently, but the same principle applies: there’s no universal benchmark to chase. Perplexity may surface your brand consistently for certain prompt types while ChatGPT barely mentions you, depending on how well your content aligns with what each model has been trained to treat as authoritative. On top of that, just like search algorithms, AI platforms are volatile and change their behavior quite often.
In both cases, the most useful benchmark is your closest competitors. A good visibility score is one that outperforms the brands competing for the same audience. If your rivals are getting mentioned in AI responses for prompts you care about while you aren’t, that gap is worth closing regardless of what the absolute numbers look like.
So, monitoring both types of visibility regularly is what gives you the context to act on the data.
How to increase your visibility
Improving visibility in both classic and AI search is crucial for brands, website owners and marketers who want to attract more traffic and generate leads. There are several ways to impact it:
- Rank higher for existing keywords and prompts or target new ones.
- Increase your mention rate on visible pages.
- Appear on popular platforms
Let’s dive deeper into each of these strategies:
1. Rank higher for existing targets
Websites that rank well in traditional search results tend to have a higher chance of appearing in AI-generated responses as well. AI platforms pull from content that search engines already treat as authoritative and relevant, so strong classic SEO is still one of the most effective foundations for AI visibility as well.
That said, there are things you can do to strengthen both classic and AI search simultaneously:
- Optimize for search intent: Understanding what users want and creating content that delivers it helps you rank higher in traditional SERPs and makes your content more likely to be cited by AI platforms. Both favor content that directly and clearly answers questions, so aligning with search intent helps to be genuinely useful.
- Focus on pages ranking on the second page of the SERP: Studies have shown that the first page of Google search results accounts for over 90% of all search traffic. This means that pages sitting just outside the top 10 are already close, and they need one final push. This case also applies to AI search. Pages that already perform well in Google’s top 10 positions have a higher chance of being referenced by systems like AI Mode and ChatGPT. Closing that gap is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make for visibility across both channels.
- Ensure your website is optimized for Core Web Vitals and mobile-friendly: Fast-loading and mobile-friendly pages tend to be easier to parse and cite for both traditional and AI search systems. Our research backs this up: pages with fast LCP times (0.2–1.02s) earn around 11% more citations in AI Mode responses compared to slower pages. And once the core factors are in shape, work on TBT, CLS, and Speed Index to give your site an extra boost.
- Fix technical errors: Broken links, crawl errors, and page issues can affect your rankings in traditional search and make your content harder for AI platforms to access and reference. Regular audits with SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool help you catch and fix these issues before they compound.
- Acquire more backlinks and organize internal links properly: Backlinks and internal links improve website structure, user experience, page authority, and topical relevance. Internal linking distributes link equity, establishes topical relevance, and improves your website’s ranking and search visibility.
Still, improving website search visibility isn’t just about ranking in the top 10 of search results. Google SERP features like knowledge panels, featured snippets, and local packs can also drive more attention and traffic to your site. To capitalize on these features, you must be familiar with the Google SERP features in this list and optimize your content accordingly. This can also help with AI visibility. For instance, AI Overviews appear with at least one SERP feature 99.25% of the time. If your content is there, it might appear in AIOs.
When building backlinks, focus on getting links from websites within your niche. Let’s say, for example, you run a blog about vegan recipes. It would be more beneficial to focus on getting links from other websites related to veganism, healthy eating, or cooking, rather than from unrelated websites like travel or fashion. You can also check which sources AI systems cite for your topic and partner with those domains to get your website mentioned.
2. Target new keywords and prompts
- Update existing content to rank for more queries by targeting less-competitive keywords: Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for in traditional search, and they tend to closely mirror the natural language people use when prompting AI platforms. Conduct a comprehensive keyword analysis with SE Ranking’s Keyword Research Tool to identify less competitive, high-volume keywords, which can help you improve your overall visibility and attract more traffic.
- Identify gaps in content and create new pages: To rank for new keywords and prompts, consider identifying gaps in your content and creating new pages to fill them. By conducting competitive research and auditing your website’s content, you can find relevant keywords that you or your competitors are not targeting. As for prompts, you can find them in AI Competitor Research under AI Results Tracker. From there, create high-quality content that provides answers to the questions your audience is searching for.
- Add relevant latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords: LSI keywords help search engines understand the context and depth of your content, and they serve a similar function for AI platforms, which rely on topical coverage to determine whether a page is a credible source on a given subject. By using this semantic SEO tactic, you can improve your relevance and help better understand the context of your content.
3. Increase your mention rate on visible pages
Getting your site referenced in AI responses isn’t purely a backlink game. Use SE Ranking to see which pages keep appearing as sources for your target prompts. Those sites have credibility, and a mention on one of them carries more weight for AI visibility than a dozen mentions on sites the LLM rarely draws from.
You can offer:
- Guest content for cited publications.
- Expert takes on industry news and developments.
- Unique data, research, and case studies.
- Etc.
Make sure, though, that your brand is consistently described the same way across sources for LLMs to build a picture of your brand from multiple references across the web. If different sources describe what you do in contradictory or vague terms, it weakens the signal. The more consistently your brand is characterized across trusted third-party pages, the more confidently AI platforms can then surface you when responding to relevant prompts.
4. Appear on popular platforms
Sometimes, the most-cited sources are platforms built on user-generated content or social media. SE Ranking’s research consistently shows Reddit, Quora, YouTube, and LinkedIn ranking among the top-cited domains in AI-generated answers across a wide range of niches. If these platforms are showing up in AI responses for prompts relevant to your business, being present and active on them is one of the most direct paths to improving your AI visibility.
What this looks like in practice depends on the platform. On Reddit, it means participating in relevant subreddits, answering questions, sharing expertise, and building a presence that earns mentions from other users. On YouTube, it means creating content that shows up when people search for topics in your space. On LinkedIn, this can be thought leadership posts and articles.
For more tips, check out our research studies on how to increase visibility in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT. We also collected top agency AEO case studies where they share tactics they used to increase AI visibility, which you might want to adopt for your projects.
Why did my visibility drop?
A decline in visibility can be a concerning sign for website owners and digital marketers since it can lead to a decrease in traffic and ultimately, revenue. There are several reasons why website visibility can drop, including changes in search performance, modifications to your projects on SEO platforms like SE Ranking, or LLM volatility.
1. Decline in search performance
The first reason why your search visibility might drop is due to a decline in your website’s search performance, which can happen for various reasons. One of the most common is fluctuations in rankings, which can happen due to changes in the search algorithm or to your website or content. For instance, outdated or irrelevant content may no longer satisfy your target audience’s needs, causing your website to lose relevance for targeted queries, resulting in lower rankings and decreased website search visibility.
Another reason for this decline is algorithm changes made by search engines like Google. These changes impact search visibility by altering the way search results are displayed or by devaluing certain ranking factors that your website relies on. For example, a website with loads of low-quality backlinks or spammy content may be penalized by search engines, leading to a decline in search engine visibility.
Furthermore, competition from other websites can also cause your website’s search performance to decline. As more businesses move online and invest in digital marketing, it can become harder to rank for certain keywords and phrases. This can result in your website being pushed down the search engine results pages by competitors who have a more established online presence and higher rankings.
2. Project changes on SEO platforms like SE Ranking.
The second reason why your website search visibility can decline is due to changes in project settings on the SE Ranking platform, which affects how the platform tracks search engine rankings and performance on SERPs for your website.
For instance, adding irrelevant or extremely competitive keywords for which your website does not rank can negatively impact your average position, which can reduce your search visibility metric. Similarly, removing keywords for which you rank highly can also affect your search engine visibility.
Moreover, changes in the tracked search engines in project settings can impact your website’s search visibility since your rankings may differ across various search engines. For example, if you monitor your website’s rankings in Google and Bing and remove Bing from your tracked search engines, it may appear as though your website’s search visibility has declined or increased, even though it hasn’t changed in Google. Furthermore, adding or removing search engines from your project can impact the number of keywords that you are tracking, which can impact your search visibility metric and make it difficult to assess the actual changes in your website’s search performance. For this reason, it’s better to avoid both types of changes when improving your website so you can better understand the cause and effects.
3. Volatility of LLM results
LLM-generated responses are volatile. AI answers can change significantly between runs of the same prompt, even within the same session. Our research into AI Mode behavior for local queries proves this. When repeating local searches in the same city, results varied between runs. On average, only 35% of domains repeated across queries. This means that roughly two-thirds of the sources that appeared in one response had vanished by the next.
To account for this, SE Ranking parses each tracked prompt three times. This gives you a more stable and reliable picture of your AI visibility rather than a snapshot that could look very different if taken an hour later. If you notice a dip in your AI visibility metrics, check whether the change is consistent across multiple data points before treating it as a signal that something needs to be fixed.
Why track website search visibility?
Performing regular search visibility checks can help you with the following:
- Comparing the visibility of your site for specific keywords with that of your rivals. This allows you to evaluate your position against your direct competitors and adjust your strategy accordingly.
- Using the SEO visibility score to get a list of the top players in your niche. This data will help you assess your chances of ranking in the top search results and understand what sets the top players apart in your niche.
- Closely studying the analytics behind your site’s positions to evaluate actual SEO results. This is an absolute must for analyzing the position change dynamics and understanding their impact on your site’s visibility score in Google or any other tracked search engine. By monitoring your website’s visibility regularly, you can assess the situation in time, predict traffic jumps and falls, and even explain why your site is receiving more or fewer visitors.
Let’s look at an example of traffic fluctuation, supposing your site moved up in the search results for several keywords but dropped by a few positions for another set of keywords.
The graph below shows a keyword that has a search volume of 14.8K searches per month that dropped by a single ranking position:
Now let’s look at another example of a keyword, but this one has 90 monthly searches and went up in rankings:
These results might seem neutral at first glance, but the site’s search engine visibility will take a huge hit if the search volume of the first keyword sees thousands of searches per month while the other keyword has below 100 searches per month. This holds true even if their average ranking position remains the same. This will cause the number of conversions and organic traffic to decrease.
The example above clearly shows why tracking your site’s search visibility isn’t just an option—but a necessity.
Alongside visibility tracking, measuring Share of Voice offers valuable insight into how your site performs against competitors in organic search. Check out our share of voice article to understand how to measure and act on this key metric.
Next, let’s take a look at how you can track the search visibility of your website using SE Ranking, an all-inclusive SEO software.
Analyzing visibility with SE Ranking
Analyzing website search visibility with SE Ranking
To determine a site’s search engine visibility in SE Ranking, you need to create a project, add all relevant keywords, and specify the search engines and locations for tracking. Once you’ve completed these steps, you will have four methods for viewing the website’s search visibility.
1. The search engine visibility of all sites added to your account. After logging into your SE Ranking account, you will be presented with a chart summarizing all of your active projects. Although the search engine visibility of each site will be displayed separately, the data shown on the Dashboard is based on all tracked search engines.
For example, if you track a site’s search positions in Google and Bing, the system calculates the overall SEO visibility in both search engines without providing separate data. Still, it’s important to note that this chart shows a rather general calculation that may not be accurate enough for a detailed analysis of search visibility dynamics.
2. Website search visibility breakdown by search engine and region. To get valuable and actionable insights from SE Ranking about search visibility, you must check each site’s visibility separately. To view the visibility chart for each search engine tracked in a project, you can use SE Ranking’s Keyword Rank Tracker tool. To do this, simply select a website, go to Rankings → Detailed, and click on the preview of the “Search visibility” graph.
The graph will display your website’s search visibility dynamics by search engine and region. To see the data for a different search engine, select it from the drop-down list. Alternatively, you can choose to view data for all tracked search engines, which will display graphs and tables with detailed information for every search engine on a single page, one by one.
3. Track search visibility of individual keywords and keyword groups. In the Detailed section of the Rankings module, you can find data on the search engine visibility of individual keywords and keyword groups, along with other digital marketing metrics such as search volume, CPC, competition, and so on. To view this information, click the “Columns” button and add the relevant parameter to the Rankings table. You can then see the data for the selected search engine in the chosen country.
4. Competitor search visibility. It’s also possible to view the visibility chart of your direct rivals by selecting a project and going to Competitors → Visibility rating. You can view the aggregate data of the search engine visibility of all tracked search engines, or separately observe the graphs for each.
When evaluating a website’s search visibility, considering the visibility data on your competitors can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the overall search dynamics.
Analyzing AI visibility with SE Ranking
To start tracking AI visibility in SE Ranking, you need to add prompts to your project for the LLMs you want to monitor (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews). Once added, the system will start collecting data, giving you a stable baseline to work from.
From there, you have several ways to analyze your AI visibility data:
- Track your overall AI visibility across platforms.
Once your prompts are set up, you can see how your brand’s AI visibility evolves over time across each tracked LLM. For example, you might notice that your mention & link presence on Perplexity is growing steadily while your ChatGPT visibility has plateaued. That’s a signal that your content is being cited in one system but hasn’t broken through in another yet. So you might want to investigate it further. Also, keep an eye on your top 3 presence dynamics.
- Analyze mention & link presence by prompt.
Drill down to see which specific prompts are generating mentions or links and which ones your brand is missing from. If your target product surfaces your competitors but not you, that’s a content gap to fill.
- Monitor your mention rate over time.
Track how often your brand appears across the source pages AI platforms are drawing from. A rising mention rate suggests your content is gaining traction as a trusted reference. A declining one can be an early warning sign that competitors are gaining ground on the sources that matter most.
If you want to go deeper into competitors’ visibility, go to AI Competitor Research. This tool lets you look up any domain and see how it performs in AI-generated responses: which prompts it appears for, how often it gets cited, and which platforms are driving its visibility. This is useful for benchmarking against rivals and finding prompts where the competition is still open.
Setting up the visibility chart display in SE Ranking
The chart displayed at the top of the Dashboard has four options (Average position, Traffic forecast, Search visibility, and % in TOP 10), but it can be configured to display the search engine visibility chart by default. To do this, go to the Dashboard settings and select the “Search visibility” graph to be shown by default.
Combining the search visibility data on your site with that of your main competitors can help you with the following:
- Prioritizing the keywords you want to rank higher in search
- Tracking search visibility dynamics
- Adjusting your SEO strategy
All of this (and more) can be easily done using SE Ranking’s tools.
Here’s to your websites achieving higher rankings and improved search engine visibility! If you haven’t started using SE Ranking to tackle your day-to-day SEO activities yet, you can try it now!
