1. Machine readability
Important facts must exist in crawlable HTML, not only inside images, scripts or interfaces a crawler cannot execute.
Visible2 Knowledge Center
AI Visibility
AI visibility is whether AI systems can correctly understand, describe and surface a business when answering relevant questions.
What is AI Visibility?
AI visibility is whether AI systems can correctly understand, describe and surface a business when answering relevant questions.
AI visibility is not a single ranking. It is the combined outcome of being machine-readable, clearly defined, independently corroborated and useful enough to be selected in an AI-generated answer.
What determines AI visibility?
2. Entity clarity
The business name, services, location, people and relationships need to form one coherent identity.
3. Corroboration
Independent sources and consistent external profiles help an AI system verify that the business is what it claims to be.
4. Answerability
Pages should answer the questions buyers actually ask, clearly enough that an assistant can use the answer.
5. Observed recommendation
Readiness is only the foundation. Actual visibility must be measured by repeatedly testing relevant prompts.
AI visibility is not the same as SEO
SEO primarily helps pages become discoverable and competitive in search results. AI visibility asks an additional question: when an assistant synthesises an answer, does it understand and select your business? The disciplines overlap, but the output is different.
How Visible2 measures it
Visible2 separates readiness from observed visibility. The free scan checks the website foundations. The AI Visibility Roadmap tests relevant buyer questions repeatedly so a single favorable answer is not mistaken for a stable result.
Two different measurements
AI readiness and AI visibility are not the same score
AI readiness
Can a crawler access the site, resolve the company, understand the offer and find clear answers? This is what a technical readiness scan can establish from the website itself.
Observed AI visibility
Does the business actually appear when buyers ask relevant questions? That requires repeated assistant testing because generated answers vary between runs, products and modes.
What current evidence says matters
Google's current guidance for generative AI search says the foundations remain SEO: crawlable technical structure, valuable non-commodity content, useful images and video, and content made for people rather than for query variations. Google also says there is no special AI markup required for its generative features.
Off-site evidence matters too. Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found branded web mentions and YouTube mentions correlate strongly with brand visibility across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews. The study is correlational, not causal, but it supports a broader strategy than simply publishing more pages.
Google: optimizing for generative AI features · Ahrefs: 75,000-brand AI visibility study
What should I do next?
Start with evidence. Run the free Visible2 scan to check whether the website foundations are in place. If the site is ready, move to repeated measurement of the buyer questions that matter rather than making speculative changes.
Related evidence
Go deeper on this topic
Supporting guides, case studies and measurement notes from the Visible2 Knowledge Center.
How to improve AI visibility: the practical order
Five steps, in order: access, identity, useful answers, corroboration and repeated measurement.
What is AI search visibility?
Whether AI assistants understand your business well enough to recommend it. It is not a ranking, and it works differently to search.
Brand mentions and AI visibility: what the 75,000-brand data actually says
The correlation is strong, the caveat matters, and “mentions are the new backlinks” is still too simplistic.
See what AI can understand about your business
Run the free scan and get the complete findings.