What is AI visibility?

AI visibility is whether AI assistants name your business when someone asks them a question you should be the answer to. When a person asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews for a recommendation, the assistant returns a short written answer naming a handful of options. AI visibility is simply this: are you one of them?

It is a different question from search ranking, and the difference matters. A ranking is a position in a list you can look up. An AI answer is generated text — there is no position ten to be on, no page two to climb from. You are either named in the answer or you are absent from it.

Why it cannot be measured like a ranking

Three properties make AI visibility harder to pin down than a keyword position, and any tool that claims otherwise is overselling.

• Answers vary. Ask the same question twice and the wording, and sometimes the businesses named, can differ.
• Answers are personalised. A signed-in assistant session carries the history and context of that particular person, which nobody else can reproduce.
• There is no ranking to report. An answer either mentions you or it does not, so the useful unit is presence across many questions and several engines, not a single number you can chart against a competitor.

How SHIJO.AI measures it

Our check is API-grounded: we query each engine through its public API with web search enabled, ask the kinds of questions your customers actually ask, and record engine by engine whether your business was named and which sources were cited.

Being explicit about the limit of that method is part of the method. Querying an API is not the same as a signed-in consumer session, which is personalised and changes over time. What you get is a directional signal at one moment — useful for spotting that four engines out of five never mention you, not a guarantee of any ranking, mention or customer outcome. Questions an engine was not asked are marked as not checked and excluded from the score rather than counted as a miss.

What to do with the answer

A first check is diagnostic. If no engine names you, the gap is usually that nothing you publish answers the question directly enough to be quoted — the work that follows is Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization, both of which are about making pages that answer questions cleanly rather than pages that merely rank.

You can run a check on your own business for free, without an account, and see the engine-by-engine result before deciding whether any of this is worth your time.