AI visibility tracking

What AI visibility tracking is

AI visibility tracking is measuring how AI answer engines describe and cite your brand when buyers ask about your category. For each prompt your buyers actually type, Sonarvue captures the real answer the engine returns and judges it on four dimensions: are you named at all, where in the answer, with what sentiment, and which competitors the AI names instead. Those judgments roll up into a single visibility score and a share-of-voice breakdown, tracked over time so you can see the trend rather than a one-off snapshot.

This is the surface where the buying decision now begins. A buyer can form an opinion of your brand from one Perplexity response without ever seeing your homepage, your reviews, or a single search result. If you don't measure that answer, you have no idea whether the AI puts you in the consideration set or hands the recommendation to a rival.

What Sonarvue measures in every answer

Named or not. The first and bluntest question: does the engine mention your brand in this answer at all? Most teams are surprised, and not in a good way, by how often the answer to a question they thought they owned never includes them.

Position. Being named third in a list reads very differently from being the brand the AI leads with. Sonarvue records where you land in the answer so you can tell a passing mention from a genuine recommendation.

Sentiment. Not every mention helps you. The same answer can name you as the category leader or as the cheaper-but-weaker option, and Sonarvue judges the tone of how you're described, not just the fact that your name appeared.

Competitors and share of voice. Every answer names someone. Sonarvue records which rivals show up alongside or instead of you and turns it into share of voice across the prompts that matter, with week-over-week movement so you see who is gaining ground in the answer-space.

Why answer-level beats link-level

Rank tracking was built for a world of ten blue links. It tells you where a page sits in a list and assumes the buyer clicks through and decides for themselves. Answer engines broke that assumption. The AI reads the sources, synthesizes them, and returns one verdict that already names the shortlist. The buyer often never clicks anything.

So a page can rank well and still go completely uncited, and a competitor with weaker rankings can be the brand the AI leads with. Crawlable is not the same as citable. Tracking where your pages rank tells you nothing about what the AI says about you, who it names instead, or why. AI visibility tracking measures the answer itself, because that is where the decision now happens.

Eight default engines on one timeline

Sonarvue tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, and Kimi together. That matters because the engines disagree. You can be the clear recommendation in one and invisible in another, and a single blended number would hide that. Sonarvue scores each engine on the same timeline so you can see exactly where you are strong, where you are missing, and how each one moves week to week, without asking eight default engines by hand and keeping the results in a spreadsheet.

Visibility tracking is the AEO half of the work: knowing precisely where you stand. The GEO half is acting on it, which is why every gap Sonarvue surfaces comes with a concrete page or prompt fix and a way to re-measure whether the answer actually changed. GEO without AEO is guesswork.

Why it matters

The losses are quiet. A buyer gets shortlisted toward a competitor inside an answer you never saw, and it never shows up as a lost deal. Content effort goes into pages the AI won't cite. A channel that is quietly becoming primary stays unmeasured because nothing in a links-and-rankings stack looks at the answer. AI visibility tracking turns that blind spot into a number you can report on, defend, and improve, with an alert the moment it moves.

And there's no setup tax to find out. No tag, no SDK, no change to your site. You give Sonarvue your brand and the prompts your buyers ask; it reads public AI answers and public social posts only. Your first read completes in minutes, so you know on day one whether the AI shortlists you or a rival.

Frequently asked

Which AI engines does Sonarvue track?

Eight: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, and Kimi. Each prompt runs against all of them, and the results are scored on one shared timeline so you compare engines side by side instead of checking each by hand.

How is the visibility score calculated?

For each prompt your buyers ask, Sonarvue reads the real answer and judges four things: are you named, in what position, with what sentiment, and against which competitors. Those per-answer judgments roll up into one visibility score and a share-of-voice breakdown against the brands the AI names instead of you.

How is this different from rank tracking?

Rank tracking tells you where a page sits in a list of blue links. AI visibility tracking measures what the answer engine actually says - whether it names you, how it describes you, and who it recommends in your place. A page can rank well and still go uncited, so the two measure different things.

How often does Sonarvue check?

On a cadence you set across all eight default engines. Saved runs build a comparable history, and alerts identify when a citation drops or a competitor overtakes you.

Do I need to install anything to track AI visibility?

No. There's no tag, no SDK, and no change to your site. You give Sonarvue your brand and the prompts your buyers ask; it reads public AI answers and public social posts only, never your site, analytics, or customer data. Your first read completes in minutes.