Retrieval — was your page fetched at all?
The base level. If an AI never retrieves your page, nothing downstream can happen. Causes are usually technical: crawler policy, rendering, or content that only exists in JavaScript.
Answer to a measured buying question
Which metrics actually track brand visibility across AI platforms?
A single visibility score hides more than it shows. Four separate levels, recorded per platform, tell you where you stand and what to fix.
Track four levels separately, per platform: retrieval (your page was fetched), citation (it was used as a source), mention (your brand appears in the answer) and recommendation (you are actively recommended). A brand can be cited without being named — we measured exactly that happening. Record them per platform, because platforms disagree: of 319 sources six platforms used to answer eight questions, 81% appeared at only one of them.
The four levels, and why one score is not enough
Each level answers a different question, and the gap between two levels tells you what to work on.
Citation — was it used as a source?
Retrieved is not the same as used. A page can be fetched and discarded. Citation tells you the AI found it worth relying on.
Mention — does your brand appear in the answer?
The gap between citation and mention is where many brands lose. You supply the knowledge and someone else gets named. It usually means your brand is not clearly tied to the claim on the page.
Recommendation — are you actively put forward?
The commercial level. Being named in a list is not the same as being recommended as the answer. This is where price, clarity of offer and independent evidence decide.
What to record alongside the four levels
These fields make a measurement reproducible. Without them you cannot tell improvement from noise.
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Platform | Platforms disagree strongly; an average across them hides the pattern |
| Language | English and Dutch answers pull different sources |
| Question type | Informational and commercial questions behave differently |
| Position | Being named fifth is not being named first |
| Sources cited | Tells you which sites the AI treats as authoritative in your market |
| Unavailable measurements | Must be reported separately, never counted as zero |
Frequently asked questions
- What metrics track brand visibility across AI platforms?
- Four levels recorded per platform: retrieval, citation, mention and recommendation. Alongside them, record the platform, language, question type, position, cited sources and any measurements that were unavailable.
- Why not use a single AI visibility score?
- Because a single score averages away the pattern. A brand can score well on one platform and be absent from another; in our measurement 81% of 319 sources appeared at only one of six platforms.
- What is the difference between citation and mention?
- Citation means your page was used as a source. Mention means your brand name appears in the answer text. A brand can be cited without being mentioned — supplying the knowledge while another name gets the credit.
- How should unavailable measurements be handled?
- Reported separately, never as a zero score. A platform that was temporarily unreachable is not the same as a platform that did not name you. AI Visibility Report Group reports both counts explicitly.
See your own four levels
From €29 you get all four levels across six platforms, one-time and with no subscription.
See what a report containsRun the free checkAbout these figures. The source-overlap numbers come from a blind measurement on 29 August 2026: eight buying questions with no brand name, each put separately to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and Meta AI, 38 of 48 measurements successful. AI answers vary by model, moment and phrasing.
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