AI Visibility: Your Guide to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

Written by Shivam Tiwari

Introducing AI Visibility: Your Guide to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

In the current digital landscape, search is no longer just about "blue links." With the rise of AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, the way users discover brands has fundamentally shifted.

AI Visibility is your comprehensive command center for this new era. It is an upgraded, granular evolution of our earlier product, GEO Watchtower, designed to help you track, analyze, and optimize your brand’s presence within Large Language Models (LLMs). Whether it’s understanding how an AI interprets your content or finding specific ways to get cited, AI Visibility provides the data-driven roadmap you need to stay relevant.

Why AI Visibility Matters in 2026

The Shift to Conversational Discovery: Users are increasingly asking complex questions to AI rather than searching for keywords. If your brand isn’t in the AI's "knowledge set," you are invisible to a massive segment of your audience.
Machine Trust is the New SEO: Appearing in AI responses requires "machine trust." AI Visibility helps you monitor the sentiment and accuracy of how these models represent you.
From Clicks to Citations: In a zero-click world, being the cited source in an AI response is the highest form of authority.

Getting Started: Easy Onboarding

We’ve designed the onboarding process to be as seamless as possible so you can start gathering insights in minutes. Here is how to set up your brand for AI tracking:

Step 1: Define Your Brand Core

To begin, you need to tell the AI what to look for.

Brand Name: Enter your official brand or company name.
Brand Domain: Input your primary website URL. This allows the tool to track mentions and attribute traffic specifically to your domain.
Target Country: Select the primary market you want to monitor. AI responses can vary significantly by region, so this ensures your data is localized and relevant.

Pro Tip: Use your most recognized brand name to ensure the widest catch of mentions across different AI models.

Step 2: Setting the Foundation (Themes & Prompts)

The final stage of onboarding involves refining the "Themes" and "Prompts" that define your brand’s AI presence. Based on your domain, Scalenut automatically organizes your core focus areas to ensure the AI engines track the right data.

Review Themes: The tool suggests industry-specific categories, such as SEO Content Creation & Optimization or Competitor & Market Analysis, to categorize your brand's expertise.
Manage Prompts: You can review, edit, or add specific prompts within each theme to fine-tune how the platform monitors your brand across different AI models.
Customization: Use the ‘Add Theme’ or ‘Add Prompt’ buttons to tailor the monitoring focus to your unique business goals.

Once you have verified your themes and prompts, click ‘Continue’ to finalize your setup and enter the dashboard.

After completing the initial setup, the Settings menu serves as your control center, allowing you to fine-tune how AI Visibility monitors your brand and manages your resource usage. You can revisit these options at any time to update your brand's profile or adjust tracking parameters as your business evolves.

Configuring Your Control Center

The settings area is divided into two core pillars: Brand identity and Competitive landscape.

1. Brand Profile & Description

This section houses the fundamental data the AI uses to identify you.

View or Change Description: You can manually edit the auto-generated description.
Why it's critical: A precise description ensures the "Smart Competitor Finding" tool looks for rivals in the correct niche and helps the AI understand your unique value proposition when analyzing brand sentiment.

2. Competitive Intelligence

Manage who you are benchmarking against to ensure your Share of Voice (SOV) metrics are accurate.

Add/Remove Competitors: You can update your list of 3–5 direct competitors at any time.
Benchmark Refresh: Updating this list immediately recalibrates your visibility scores, showing how your brand's citations compare to the new set of rivals.

Tracking Preferences & Resource Management - Buy More Prompts

Real-Time Usage Tracking: The dashboard card displays your current consumption (e.g., 100 out of 10 Prompts), giving you a clear indicator of when it’s time to expand.

If you are looking to scale your insights or upgrade your plan, this is where you control the "intensity" of your monitoring:

Number of Prompts: Control the volume of specific queries the system tracks. As your brand grows, you may want to increase this to cover more "long-tail" or product-specific questions.
AI Engine Selection: Choose which LLMs to monitor (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google AI Overviews). You can focus on engines most relevant to your specific audience.
Refresh Frequency: Define how often the system scans for new data. While Weekly is the industry standard for trend spotting, higher-tier plans may allow for Daily refreshes to catch rapid shifts in AI behavior.

Exploring the AI Visibility Features

Now that you have configured your account and set up your tracking, let’s dive into the four core features of the AI Visibility module. These tools allow you to monitor, analyze, and optimize your brand’s presence in AI-generated search results.

Brand Monitor - Track how your brand appears across AI-powered search engines.

Visibility Score

The Visibility Score represents how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers compared to your competitors. A higher score indicates a stronger and more frequent presence across AI Engines.

Visualization: This can be viewed as a Line chart (to track trends over time) or a Bar chart (for a direct competitive snapshot).

Visibility Rank

This is your brand's numerical position based on your overall Visibility Score among all tracked competitors.

Pro Tip: You can also click the Expanded View to see the full leaderboard of all brands in your category.

Average Position

This metric tracks your average ranking within the AI-generated response itself. For example, if an AI list features three brands, were you listed first or third?

Note: A lower number indicates a better ranking (being #1 is the goal).
Visualization: Viewable in both Line chart or Bar chart formats.

Average Position Rank

This provides your ranking based specifically on your average position performance across all AI Engines. It shows who consistently secures the "top spot" in AI conversations.

Pro Tip: Use the Expanded View to see how your placement consistency compares to others.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice (SOV) is the percentage of total AI responses where your brand is mentioned. It is the primary metric for measuring brand dominance compared to your competitors.

Visualization: This can be viewed in a Line chart or a Pie chart for a clear breakdown of market share.

Share of Voice Rank

Your specific rank among all tracked brands based on your Share of Voice percentage.

Pro Tip: Click the Expanded View to see which brands are eating into your market share or where you are gaining ground.

Visibility Heatmap

The Heatmap allows you to compare brand visibility and rank across competitors or specific themes with individual AI Engines (e.g., how you perform on ChatGPT vs. Perplexity).

Customization: You can toggle this data based on the Competitor or Theme, and filter it by either Visibility Score or Average Position.

Visibility Rankings

This section shows exactly which brands rank for which specific Theme and Prompt. It is designed to help you identify your topical strengths and where you have gaps in your content.

Interaction: Click on a specific Theme to see every related Prompt (user question) that feeds into that data.

Moving from the high-level dashboard of the Brand Monitor, we now dive into the specific language and data points that drive your visibility: Prompts Insights.

Prompts Insights - Analyze the specific user queries and themes where your brand appears.

This feature provides a deep-dive list of prompts generated based on your brand and targeted themes. It allows you to see exactly how AI models respond to the questions your audience is asking.

Navigating Your Prompts

Search & Filter: Use the search bar to find specific prompts, or filter by Themes
Add Prompts: You can manually include specific queries you want to track using the + Add Prompt option.
Group by Theme: Toggle this view to see all prompts related to a specific topical cluster.

Understanding Prompt Data

For every prompt, the tool tracks several key performance indicators:

Visibility %: The percentage of times your brand appears in the response for this specific prompt.
Position: Your brand's rank within the AI response.
Executions: The number of times the tool has run this specific prompt to gather data.
Citations: How often your content is referenced as a primary source.
Mention: Whether your brand was name-dropped in the text, even if a link wasn't provided.
Competitors: A list of other brands appearing for the same query.
Last Updated: The date and time this data was most recently refreshed.

Prompt Deep Dive (Expanded View)

When you click on any particular prompt, a detailed overlay appears, providing a granular look at performance for that specific question across different platforms.

Performance Metrics

Visibility Score & Visibility Score Rank: Shows your brand's overall presence and leaderboard standing for this single prompt.

Average Position & Average Position Rank: Tracks your placement within the answer and how you rank compared to others for this query.

The Responses Tab

This tab provides the raw data from every time the AI was "asked" this prompt:

Date & Platform: When the execution happened and which AI engine (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity) was used.
Region: The geographical location for the response.
Response: A snippet or full view of the AI-generated text.
Rank & Mentioned: Your specific placement and confirmation of your brand's presence.
All Mentions: A list of all brands (including competitors) mentioned in that execution.
Citations: The specific sources the AI used to back up its answer.
Fan Query: Displays the specific Query Fanout (the sub-queries LLMs search on the internet to answer the user's prompt).

The Citations Tab

A dedicated view showing every Domain, URL, and Title that the AI cited as a source for this specific prompt.

Query Fanout

Query Fanout represents the "reasoning" step of an AI engine. When a user asks a complex question, the AI breaks it down into multiple sub-queries to search for a more comprehensive answer.

Why it matters: Seeing these sub-queries helps you understand the different "angles" the AI considers when building its final response for your brand.

Sentiments

AI doesn't just mention your brand; it talks about it with a specific emotional tone.

Positive: AI recommends your brand or speaks highly of its features/service.
Neutral: AI mentions your brand factually or in a list without specific praise or criticism.
Negative: AI highlights a drawback, a poor review, or a limitation of your product.
Occurrence: This metric shows how often each sentiment type appears across all executions of a prompt.

Citations & Attribution

Citations are the digital "footnotes" AI engines use to prove their answers are based on real-world facts. These are critical because they are the primary drivers of traffic back to your website.

Citation Share: This represents the percentage of total citations you own within a specific category or theme. If there are 100 links cited across all prompts in a theme and 13 of them are yours, your Citation Share is 13%.

Citation Rank: Your position on the leaderboard of cited domains. A rank of #1 means your website is the most frequently referenced source for that data set.

Citation Categories: A breakdown of the types of websites the AI is using for information. Categories include Company Sites, Social (e.g., YouTube, Reddit), Blogs, News, Reviews, and Tech.

Top Citation Domain: This identifies which specific website (yours, a competitor's, or a third-party site like YouTube) is the most "trusted" source by the AI for your tracked prompts.

Top Citation Pages: A detailed list of the specific URLs that are being cited the most. This tells you exactly which of your articles, product pages, or videos are providing the most value to AI search engines.

Building on your insights from the Prompts and Citations sections, we now move to the most important part of the tool: taking action.

The Recommendations module turns data into a practical playbook. It identifies exactly what you need to do to earn more citations and push your brand to the top of AI-generated answers.

Recommendations - Actionable steps to get your brand cited and ranked in AI responses

This section bridges the gap between knowing your visibility and improving it. It provides three specific avenues for growth:

1. New Article Opportunities

AI models often ignore brands because they lack fresh, relevant content that answers specific user queries.

How it works: Check the Target Prompt and Keyword suggested by the tool. These are high-value gaps where a competitor might be ranking, but you are not.
Take Action: Hover over a specific keyword or prompt to instantly generate a draft or content brief. This allows you to create "AI-ready" articles that directly address the prompts users are asking.

2. Backlink Suggestions

Generative engines prioritize sources with high authority. This section identifies the exact domains the AI is already citing for your target prompts.

The Marketplace Integration: Check the Target Prompt Domain URL.
Direct Secure: If the domain is available in our Backlinks Marketplace, you can secure a backlink immediately. You will be redirected to the marketplace to finalize the placement—no outreach or negotiation required.
Manual Outreach: If the domain is not currently in our marketplace, you will see the URL so you can reach out to that site directly to request a guest post or link insertion.

3. Platform Engagement Opportunities

AI models (especially ChatGPT and Perplexity) rely heavily on community discussions from platforms like Reddit and Quora to form opinions on brands.

How it works: This section highlights active threads and discussions where your target themes are being debated.
Take Action: You can check the conversation and use the provided link to directly join the discussion. Engaging here helps "train" the sentiment and data points the AI picks up for future responses.

Finally, we move to the last piece of the puzzle: AI Traffic Monitor. This tool helps you understand how the visibility you've built is translating into actual traffic.

AI Traffic Monitor - Discover how leading LLMs interpret and drive traffic to your content.

Traditional analytics tools often struggle to separate human visitors from AI bots. The AI Traffic Monitor solves this by providing a specialized lens into how Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with your site.

The Setup: Cloudflare Integration

To unlock these insights, you must integrate your AI Visibility module with Cloudflare. This connection allows the tool to intercept and analyze "Edge-based" data that regular trackers might miss.

Help Resource: For a step-by-step guide on the connection process, refer to our detailed article: [How to Integrate AI Visibility with Cloudflare for AI Traffic Monitoring].

Key Data Points & Insights

Once connected, your dashboard will populate with three critical sections:

1. Trend of Traffic

This chart provides a high-level visualization of how different types of traffic interact with your brand over time. It distinguishes between traditional search behavior and the growing influence of AI-driven discovery:

AI Traffic: This represents the volume of requests coming from AI crawlers and bots (such as GPTBot) that are actively visiting your site to fetch data for LLM training or real-time user responses.
Organic Traffic: This tracks traditional visitors who find your site through standard search engine results pages (SERPs) without an AI intermediary.
Human via AI: This specific metric identifies users who have been referred to your site directly by an AI engine (e.g., clicking a citation link within a ChatGPT or Perplexity response).

Insight: By monitoring the "Human via AI" trend, you can measure the actual conversion of AI visibility into website visits, helping you understand how effectively AI engines are driving traffic to your brand.

2. Bot Leaderboard

Not all AI engines are created equal. The Bot Leaderboard identifies which specific AI bots are most active on your site.

Why it matters: If you see high activity from PerplexityBot but low activity from GPTBot, you know which engine is currently finding your content most "cite-worthy."

3. Page Performance

This section identifies your "AI Superstars"—the specific pages on your website that are performing best in the AI search landscape.

Metrics Tracked: It analyzes the relationship between Human Traffic Volume, Visibility Scores, and Recent Ranking Trends.
Strategic Use: Use this to identify which content formats (e.g., "How-to" guides vs. "Product Comparisons") AI models prefer to surface to their users.

Summary: The AI Visibility at a Glance

The AI Visibility module is an all-in-one suite designed to help you navigate and dominate the new landscape of AI-powered search. From high-level brand tracking to granular traffic analysis, the tool is built around four core pillars:

1. Brand Monitor (The Strategy)

This is your competitive command center. It tracks your Visibility Score and Share of Voice to tell you how often AI engines are talking about you compared to your rivals. It helps you identify which AI platforms prefer your brand and where your competitors might be gaining an edge.

2. Prompts Insights (The Data)

This section takes you into the "mind" of the AI. By analyzing the specific Prompts and Themes that trigger brand mentions, you can see exactly what users are asking and how AI responds. With features like Query Fanout and Sentiment Analysis, you gain a deep understanding of your brand’s reputation and the logic AI uses to find you.

3. Recommendations (The Action)

Knowledge is only powerful when acted upon. This module provides a personalized playbook to improve your rankings. It offers:

Content Opportunities to fill topical gaps.
Backlink Suggestions to build authority on the domains AI trusts most.
Engagement Prompts to influence the social conversations that train AI models.

4. AI Traffic Monitor (The Results)

Finally, this module closes the loop by showing you the real-world impact of your efforts. By integrating with Cloudflare, it separates human visitors from AI Bots, showing you which pages are the most "cite-worthy" and how AI visibility is driving growth for your website.