Ways to measure AI visibility, and what each one misses

The simplest check is to ask once and look.

Ask an AI assistant the same question twice and the answer changes. Measured across 1,622 answers collected on 18 and 19 Aug 2026: when one answer names a business, asking again names it again about four times in five on Perplexity and about half the time on ChatGPT. That is why every question is asked three times and every answer is counted. One answer on its own can mislead; three make the count reflect what each AI assistant does.

One answer shows what one person might have seen once. A count across repeated answers shows how often you are named.

Without a city in the question, the answer may not be about your market at all, and a local business competes in its own city. The same question in two cities names different businesses: in pest control, the chains that led in Dallas were outside the top four in Boise.

Every question we ask names the city you're tracking, on all five AI assistants. Google also tailors its results to where the person searching is located, so for Google we run the search from that city as well, and read the AI Overview it returns.

Folding every AI assistant into a single number hides the difference between them. One can name you in most answers while another never does, and the fix for each can differ. Look at each AI assistant, then at the total.

“Named three times” means little until you know out of how many. Some answers recommend nobody, and some searches show no AI answer at all.

The figure Spruce reports, "named in 2 of 4 answers that recommended a business", counts only those answers. When an answer recommends no business, there was nothing to be named in, so it is reported on its own rather than counted against your results.

Google shows an AI Overview for some searches and not others. A search without one is recorded as its own outcome and kept out of your denominator, so only searches that had an answer count toward your results.

Being named and being used as a source are different things, and a measurement should say which it counts.

Add a website and we can also measure whether pages on it are being used as sources for the answers. That is a different finding from being named, with its own denominator: a business can be named without being cited (an AI assistant recommends you from a directory rather than from your own pages), and cited without being named (an answer draws on one of your pages without naming you). Without a website, that measurement reads as unknown rather than as a zero.

We ask each AI assistant the same questions a customer would, through an API, so the same question asked next week is comparable to this week's. That repeatability is what makes a trend line mean something. An API answer is usually more concise than the one someone sees in the app, and cites fewer sources, so read a count here as the pattern across many answers rather than a record of one person's screen.

We measure weekly rather than daily. Answers vary enough between identical questions that a daily chart would mostly show the AI assistant changing its mind rather than a change in your visibility.

Every figure a Spruce plan reports is a count across repeated answers, asked in your city, shown for each AI assistant as well as in total, with its denominator and the date it was measured. The whole method is on our methodology page.