Visibility scoring

The AnswerixAI Visibility score is a 0–100 measure of how visible your brand is in AI answers. It combines how often AI engines mention you, how often they cite your website, and how early they name you, across every answer that matches your filters. This page explains the formula, the per-answer score used in breakdowns, and how date ranges and changes work.

What is the Visibility score?#

The Visibility score is a single 0–100 number for your brand's presence in AI answers. Every answer in the selected period counts, including answers where your brand doesn't appear. A score of 0 means no answer in the period mentioned or cited you. To raise the score you need to show up in more answers, be cited more often, and be named earlier.

How is the Visibility score calculated?#

AnswerixAI calculates the Visibility score as 100 × (0.6 × mention rate + 0.25 × citation rate + 0.15 × position factor). Mention rate carries 60% of the weight, citation rate 25% and position factor 15%, and the result is rounded to one decimal place.

Visibility = 100 × (0.6 × mention rate + 0.25 × citation rate + 0.15 × position factor)

The score is rounded to one decimal place. You can see the same formula in the dashboard: open Visibility and click Formulas.

How does the position factor work?#

For each answer that mentions your brand, AnswerixAI ranks you against your tracked competitors by the order they first appear. Named first scores 1, second scores 0.5 (1/2), third scores 0.33 (1/3), and so on. The position factor is the average of these values.

Before the position factor enters the score, it is scaled down when only a few answers mention you. The scaling factor is mentions ÷ (mentions + 20), where "mentions" is the number of answers that mention your brand. At 20 mentioning answers the position factor counts at half strength, and it approaches full strength as mentions grow. This stops a brand that was named first in a handful of answers from outranking brands that show up consistently.

What does a worked example look like?#

Say the selected period has 100 AI answers. 40 of them mention your brand, 20 cite one of your domains, and your average position value in the 40 mentioning answers is 0.5.

1. Mention rate = 40 ÷ 100 = 0.4, so the mention part is 0.6 × 0.4 = 0.24.
2. Citation rate = 20 ÷ 100 = 0.2, so the citation part is 0.25 × 0.2 = 0.05.
3. The position scaling is 40 ÷ (40 + 20) ≈ 0.667, so the scaled position factor is 0.5 × 0.667 ≈ 0.333, and the position part is 0.15 × 0.333 ≈ 0.05.
4. Visibility = 100 × (0.24 + 0.05 + 0.05) = 34.0.

Is sentiment part of the Visibility score?#

No. Sentiment is shown next to the Visibility score as Positive sentiment (positive answers ÷ answers mentioning you × 100), but it doesn't change the headline score.

Are competitors scored the same way?#

Yes. Every competitor on the leaderboard is scored with the same formula over the same set of answers, so your score and a competitor's score are directly comparable. The same formula also applies to any subset of answers, such as a single prompt, topic or platform.

How is a mention detected?#

A mention is your brand name, or one of your brand's domains, appearing in the answer text as a whole word. Matching ignores case and ignores words that merely contain your name. For example, a brand named "acme" is not counted as mentioned in an answer that only says "acmecorp". URLs in the answer are removed before counting, so a cited URL doesn't also count as a text mention.

A citation counts toward you when the cited URL's host is one of the domains saved for your brand, or a subdomain of one (for example, blog.example.com for example.com). Add every domain you own in Brand settings so none of your citations are missed.

What is the per-answer visibility score?#

AnswerixAI also gives every individual AI answer its own 0–100 per-answer visibility score, built from mentions (up to 40 points), own-domain citations (up to 30), citation share (up to 15) and sentiment (up to 15). The dashboard uses the per-answer score as a secondary signal, for example in the per-platform breakdown.

The total is capped at 100. Unlike the headline Visibility score, the per-answer score includes sentiment, so the two numbers are not interchangeable.

Which time window does the score use?#

The Visibility score always covers the date range selected in the filter bar. On the Visibility page the default range is the last 24 hours. The trend chart plots the score computed over the same window length, ending on each day, so the newest point matches the Visibility card.

How are score changes calculated?#

The up and down change next to a metric compares the selected period with the previous period of equal length. For example, with the last 7 days selected, the change compares those 7 days with the 7 days before. Changes in the Visibility score are shown in points, not percentages: a move from 20 to 25 is +5 points.

Where do you see visibility in the dashboard?#

AnswerixAI shows visibility on three dashboard pages. The Visibility page has your Visibility score, trend chart and competitor leaderboard, the Topics page has each topic's Visibility Rate, and the Prompts page has visibility for each tracked prompt.

• Visibility: your Visibility score with its change and trend chart, and a leaderboard that scores you and your competitors with the same formula.
• Topics: a Visibility (30d) column showing each topic's Visibility Rate, the share of the topic's prompts with results where AI answers mentioned or cited your brand at least once in the last 30 days. Changes are shown in points.
• Prompts: visibility for each tracked prompt, which you can sort by.

For a guided tour of the Visibility page, see Visibility.