every number, shown its work
A visibility score is worthless if it cannot survive scrutiny. This page is the whole method: what we ask, how often, how the score is built, and where its limits are.
the questions
Eighteen queries per check, fixed so scores are comparable across businesses. Phrasing varies deliberately, because assistants answer “best” and “who do you recommend” differently, and that spread is part of the measurement.
the surfaces and runs
Each query runs against every surface through its official API with live web search enabled, twice per surface and three times for the discovery lane, because large language models answer differently run to run. A typical check captures roughly 125 answers, about 40 per assistant. Every capture stores the exact prompt, the full response, cited sources, the model, and a timestamp, and captures are immutable once written.
the score
| Visibility | 45 | Whether and where you appear in answers to unbranded customer questions, weighted by intent. Sole or top recommendation scores full; a passing mention scores low. |
| Site readability | 25 | Deterministic site checks: structured data, AI crawler access in robots.txt, question-shaped citable content, sitemap, content depth. Reproducible by anyone. |
| Accuracy | 15 | What AI says about you on direct questions: hours, services, location, or confusing you with a similarly named business. Scored on whether AI can answer direct questions about you at all; claims are extracted verbatim, a person reviews them, and confirmed errors subtract. |
| Entity footprint | 15 | The identity signals on your own site that AI grounds on: name, address, and phone visible and structured, links to your official profiles, and a real about page. |
Scoring is arithmetic over the captured evidence. No model chooses the score. The rubric is versioned, and a score always names its version.
variance, honestly
Visibility is reported as a rate with a 90 percent confidence interval, and the headline score carries that range: “34, range 29 to 39 across 126 captured answers.” The report never makes single-run claims. It does not say “you never appear”; it says “you appeared in 0 of 2 runs of this question on this surface on this date,” with the captures attached.
the limits
Answers are generated through the providers’ official APIs with live web search, which can differ from their consumer apps; the report names the exact surface used. Personalization and device location cannot be fully simulated. Google’s AI Overviews are not yet a measured surface; when they are added, the same capture and scoring rules will apply. AI answers change continuously, so every report is stamped with its measurement date. Where a dimension was not measured, the report says so instead of estimating.
by · methodology v2