# What AI visibility measures

> How Scout asks the questions your buyers ask of AI assistants, reads whether you came up, and what each number on the AI visibility screens can and cannot tell you.

Your buyers no longer only search. They ask. They put a question to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity, read one answer, and act on it. If that answer names a competitor and not you, you were never in the running, and no search ranking would have told you.

AI visibility is how Audience measures that. Scout asks the same questions your buyers ask, reads each answer, and records whether you came up, where in the answer you appeared, how you were described, and which pages the assistant built the answer from. It is the only section of Audience that you configure and spend against, which is why it sits on its own rather than inside Reports.

![The AI visibility overview: where you stand and this week's moves](/docs/screens/ai-visibility-overview.png)
_The Overview tab answers one question first: do assistants mention you?_

## What Scout reads in an answer

For every question on your panel, every assistant, every run, Scout records four things.

| What                    | Meaning                                                                                                                                        |
| ----------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Named** or **Absent** | Whether your company appeared in the answer at all. A question that has never been run shows **Not asked**, which is different from losing it. |
| Position                | Where you sat inside the answer that named you. First, second, third. This is a place in a paragraph, not a search rank.                       |
| Tone                    | How you were described, from −100 to 100. Blank when the run did not assess tone.                                                              |
| Built from              | The pages the assistant retrieved while answering, and the other companies it named instead of you.                                            |

The Overview turns these into a scorecard, [Where you stand](/ai-visibility/where-you-stand), and into the three most valuable fixes, [This week's moves](/ai-visibility/this-weeks-moves). The Questions tab shows every question and every answer.

## Two lanes

AI visibility has two lanes, and they answer different questions.

**Your panel.** The questions you confirmed, asked of the assistants on a schedule, read for your own company. This is the lane that measures you. It is built on the [prompt panel](/ai-visibility/build-your-prompt-panel), and everything in Overview, Questions and Sources comes from it.

**The wider market.** A modelled estimate of how often your brand and your confirmed competitors are mentioned across a broad corpus of AI answers, with an estimate of how many people ask about your topics. It is broad and cheap, and it is not about your own questions. It lives on the Market tab, and it is measured only when you ask.

## What the numbers cannot tell you

Answer engines do not repeat themselves exactly. Audience says so wherever it matters, and the caveats travel with the data rather than sitting in a footnote.

- **One answer is one sample.** Each result is a single answer from one assistant on one day. Read a pattern across runs, never a single line. This is why the panel runs every morning rather than once a week.
- **A blank tone is not a neutral one.** When the run did not score tone, the field is empty. Audience never renders an unassessed brand as zero, because a brand nobody assessed is not a brand assessed and found unremarkable.
- **Position is within the answer.** "Average position 1.4" means you were usually named first or second in the answers that named you. It says nothing about search results.
- **Market volume is modelled.** "AI search volume" on the Market tab is an estimate from a third-party corpus, not a count of real questions. One large brand in your confirmed competitor set can dominate that share.
- **Coverage varies by assistant.** Figures for one of the assistants cover the US in English only, and the Market tab says so when it applies to you.

## When it is switched off

AI visibility can be switched off for a workspace. The section still appears in the navigation, but the page says **AI visibility is switched off.** and explains that nothing is being measured or billed. Every action on the section is unavailable until it is switched back on.

## Related

- [Build your prompt panel](/ai-visibility/build-your-prompt-panel) to choose the questions Scout asks.
- [Costs and cadence](/ai-visibility/costs-and-cadence) for what runs on its own and what you pay for.
- [Questions, sources and market](/ai-visibility/questions-sources-and-market) for the three tabs behind the overview.