Every day, millions of people ask ChatGPT and Google AI Mode which software to buy. Best CRM for a 50-person sales team. Best design tool for real-time collaboration. Best project management platform that integrates with Jira. The AI responds with specific brand recommendations, cites its sources, and moves on.
Your brand is either in that response — or it isn't. And until recently, you had absolutely no way to know which one it was.
Traditional analytics tell you about website traffic and click-through rates. They tell you nothing about whether AI engines recommend you, what they say about you, or which competitors they name instead. That's the measurement gap this post is here to close.
The Four Metrics That Define AI Search Visibility
AI search visibility isn't measured the same way as traditional search. There are no "keyword rankings" in the conventional sense. Instead, four core metrics tell you whether AI engines consider your brand worth recommending — and how strongly.
| Metric | What It Measures | Traditional Equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| AI Visibility Score | % of monitored queries where your brand appears in the AI response | Impression share |
| Share of Voice | Your recommendation frequency and position relative to competitors | Market share of search |
| Average Rank | Your average position when the AI lists multiple recommendations | Average ranking position |
| Citation Sources | Which websites the AI cites when mentioning your brand | Referring domains |
A quick note on Share of Voice, because it's the metric most people misunderstand. SoV isn't just "how often you get mentioned." It accounts for two things: how frequently the AI recommends you across queries, and where you appear in the recommendation list. Getting mentioned fifth out of five tools in 50 queries is a very different SoV than getting mentioned first in 30 queries. Position matters. Frequency matters. SoV captures both.
Together, these four metrics answer the question every B2B marketer should be asking: when someone asks an AI engine about my category, does my brand show up, how prominently, and based on what evidence?
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How Qvery Works: From Setup To Daily Insights
We built Qvery at Empact Partners because we needed it ourselves. You can't credibly help partners grow their AI search visibility if you can't measure it. Qvery is an AI Engine Researcher — an autonomous agent that tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode in 200+ countries. Here's the step-by-step of how it actually works.
Step 1: AI-driven topic generation
You provide your brand name, website, and category. Qvery's AI agent autonomously generates the topics and queries that matter for your brand. No keyword brainstorming sessions. No spreadsheets of "terms we think are important." (Those are about as useful as asking your dentist which restaurant to try.)
The agent analyzes your space and builds a comprehensive query set that your potential buyers would actually ask an AI engine. For a CRM tool, that might include "best CRM for small sales teams," "which CRM integrates with HubSpot," and "CRM software for enterprise deals" — grouped into logical topic clusters.
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Step 2: Daily query execution across AI engines
Once your topics are set, Qvery runs every query daily across both ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. It captures the full response, identifies every brand mentioned, extracts every citation, and records where your brand appeared — or didn't.
This isn't a monthly PDF that arrives two weeks after the data was relevant. It's a daily pulse. And that matters, because AI search results are probabilistic. The same query can produce different recommendations on different days. Daily tracking captures that variance and gives you a statistically meaningful picture over time.
Step 3: Citation tracking and source analysis
For every AI response that mentions your brand, Qvery tracks which sources the AI cited. This is where the data gets genuinely actionable.
You can see that ChatGPT recommended your product for "best project management tool for remote teams" and cited a G2 review, a Reddit thread, and a TechCrunch article as its evidence. That tells you three things:
Step 4: Competitive Share of Voice
Qvery doesn't track your brand in isolation. It tracks every competitor mentioned in the same responses. When ChatGPT recommends five CRM tools, you see all five — and you see how your Share of Voice compares across every topic.
This is where most marketing teams have their first uncomfortable realization. They assumed they were the category leader. Qvery shows them they're the fifth recommendation — after four competitors they'd never considered threats. Surprise.
From Measurement To Action: A Diagnostic Framework
Measurement without action is expensive navel-gazing. (Or as we call it in the consultancy world, "a deliverable.") The whole point of tracking AI search visibility is to improve it. Here's how to diagnose what the data is telling you and what to do about it.
Low Visibility Score: you have a presence problem
If your AI visibility score is below 20%, AI engines don't consider you a relevant player. The fix isn't more blog posts — it's more mentions. You need your brand to appear across more independent sources: review sites, comparison articles, Reddit discussions, industry publications. AI engines need multiple signals before they'll recommend you.
This is where Existing Article Outreach becomes your highest-return activity. Find the articles AI engines already cite when they answer queries in your category. Get your brand mentioned in those articles. Your visibility score will follow.
Low Share of Voice: you have a competitive problem
If your visibility score is decent but your SoV is low, AI engines know you exist — they just prefer your competitors. The diagnostic here is straightforward: look at the citation sources for your competitors' recommendations. Where are they mentioned that you're not? Those gaps are your roadmap.
Remember, SoV accounts for both position and frequency. You might appear in plenty of responses but consistently at position 4 or 5. That drags your SoV down hard. Strengthening your entity signals — more consistent branding, more authoritative mentions, better structured data — pushes you up the list.
The Five-Step Visibility Growth Playbook
Qvery tells you where you stand. The next question is how to move. Here's the framework we use with our partners at Empact Partners — informed directly by what Qvery data shows actually works.
The brands that grow their AI visibility fastest treat this data like an operational input — something that informs weekly decisions — not a quarterly vanity report that gets skimmed during an all-hands meeting.
Getting Started With Qvery
If you haven't measured your AI search visibility yet, you're making decisions based on intuition in a channel that's growing faster than any other. You might be the category leader in AI search. You might be invisible. Either way — wouldn't you rather know?
Qvery offers three tiers:
And if you want help not just measuring but improving your AI search visibility, that's what we do at Empact Partners. Measurement is step one. Building the mention footprint, the Reddit presence, and the content architecture that turns invisible brands into recommended ones — that's everything after. Let's figure out where you stand.
