Stage 01 · Baseline
What this step answers
Where do you stand today, and against whom?
The vocabulary
The measures
Six things are measured. Four of them are defined here, along with the one term the rest of this industry uses loosely.
- AI VisibilityHow often you appear at all in answers to the questions your buyers ask.
- AI RecommendationHow often a system puts you forward as worth considering, rather than merely mentioning you in passing.
- AI PositionWhere you appear relative to the other suppliers named in the same answer. Being named third in a list of three is not the same result as being named first.
- Entity AccuracyWhether a system describes your company, products and markets correctly. A supplier still described by a product line it discontinued has an accuracy problem, not a visibility one.
- Citation shareThe share of tested questions in which your company is named. It is one component of AI Visibility and not another word for it.
Citation Presence and Citation Authority measure the sources an answer rests on rather than the answer itself. Both are defined on Prove.
The work
What we do
- Write 30–50 questions with you, in your buyers’ words, and get them approved before testing
- Agree up to five competitors — the ones that turn up when your buyers ask, not the ones you’d like to be compared with
- Run every question on every system, worded identically
- Record who was named, who was recommended, and in what order
- Note how each system describes you, including where it is wrong
The deliverable
What you receive
You receive
The AI Visibility Scorecard: your figures and your competitors’, the questions where you appeared, the questions where you did not, and what the systems currently believe about your company. The full question set comes with it, so anyone can repeat the test.
Sequence
Why it has to come first
Six months of work is easy to sell and hard to prove. Without a first number, nothing that follows can be judged — by you or by us.