How visibility is scored

Definition

Visibility (Citation Rate) is the percentage of your tracked prompts where your brand appears in the AI response, over a given time period.

Formula: Visibility % = (prompts where brand appeared ÷ total prompts tracked) × 100

Example: 100 active prompts, brand appeared in 67 responses → Visibility = 67%.

How it's calculated

Every day, Promptive sends each active prompt to every engine on your plan. It parses the response to check if your brand name or any alias appears. "Appears" means a string match (with fuzzy handling for minor variations) against the full response text — not just the first sentence.

Position is determined by the order of brand mentions in the response. If the AI says "Top tools: A, B, C, Acme, E" and Acme is your brand, your position for that response is 4.

Daily visibility is the count of prompts with a match divided by the total prompts run that day. The dashboard shows the rolling average over your selected period (default 28 days).

Aggregation across engines

When you have multiple engines, your overall Citation Rate is the average of individual engine rates, weighted equally. If ChatGPT gives you 80% and Gemini gives you 40%, your blended rate is 60%.

You can see per-engine breakdown in the Platform Performance table — the blended rate is always shown in the headline KPI cards.

What affects visibility

Your visibility in AI responses is influenced by:

• Training data presence — how frequently your brand appeared in the data AI platforms were trained on
• Citation authority — whether you're referenced on domains AI systems trust and cite
• Prompt specificity — highly specific prompts (e.g., naming your exact category) produce higher visibility than broad ones
• Competitor saturation — in crowded categories, AI systems mention more brands per response, diluting individual visibility
• Recency — AI systems with retrieval (like Perplexity) are influenced by very recent content; training-data-based systems (like ChatGPT) change more slowly

Visibility doesn't change as fast as a keyword ranking does. Meaningful shifts typically take weeks to months, not days. Day-to-day variation is normal; focus on the 28-day trend.