What is an AI visibility report?

The short definition

An AI visibility report shows whether AI answer engines cite your website when they answer questions in your market, and which competitors they cite instead. It sits alongside a ranking report rather than replacing it, because the two measure genuinely different things.

The metrics that matter

AI Overview presence

Does an AI Overview appear for this keyword at all? This is the denominator for everything else, and it is not stable — Google adds and removes Overviews per query over time. A citation rate quoted without presence data is unreadable, because you cannot tell whether a zero means you were passed over or that there was nothing to be cited in.

Citation rate

Of the keywords where an Overview appears, what share cite your domain? This is the headline number. Tracked over weeks it tells you whether your content changes are landing.

Cited competitors

Which domains are named instead of you? This is the most actionable section of any AI visibility report, because it is a reading list. The engine has already told you which pages it considers quotable on this subject — the useful next step is to open them and compare their structure to yours.

Uncited gaps

The keywords where an Overview appears, you rank respectably, and you are still not cited. These are the highest-value targets on the report: the authority problem is already solved, so what remains is usually a content shape problem, which is far cheaper to fix than a ranking one.

Assistant mentions

Separately from Google, do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude name you when asked the questions your customers ask? These engines answer from different indexes on different refresh cycles, so a strong Google position tells you very little about them.

How to read one

Read it in this order, because each step narrows the next:

1. Presence first. If almost none of your keywords trigger an Overview, AI visibility is not currently your constraint and you should spend the effort on rankings.
2. Then the uncited gaps. Ranking well but never cited is a solvable content problem, and the fastest win on the report.
3. Then the cited competitors. Read the pages that beat you. Look specifically at how quickly they state an answer after the heading.
4. Then assistants. Treat these as a separate programme; the same fixes help, but on a slower feedback loop.

What a bad report usually means

Three patterns account for most poor results. No presence means your keywords are transactional enough that Google is not generating answers — that is fine, and not a problem to solve. Presence with no citation anywhere in your market usually means the Overview is drawing on large publishers rather than vendors. Presence with competitors cited and not you is the actionable case, and almost always comes down to answer-first structure and missing markup rather than domain authority.

Getting one for your site

The free AI visibility checker runs a live check on any domain without a signup and shows whether the major assistants recommend you. A tracked account adds the parts that only make sense over time — daily AI Overview citation history, cited competitor lists per keyword, and Search Console click data alongside them — and, on the Agency plan, sends the whole thing to clients under your own branding.