Metrics · 10 scores, from their own docs · checked November 8, 2026
An AI visibility score is, at most tools, the share of AI answers that name your brand, sometimes weighted by position or set against competitors. It doesn't count whether the answer tells the buyer to pick you. The recommendation rate does.
Our pick for the number that matters
Want to know how often AI recommends you, not how often it names you? supereo ours leads with its recommendation rate: the share of answers to your buyers' questions that recommend you, with its range. Its free audit shows every answer marked mentioned, recommended or cited, in about 2 minutes with no card. Get your grade.
Ten scores, each defined in the vendor's own words. "A hit" is what has to happen in an answer for it to count toward the score.
| Tool | Score | How it's calculated | A hit is | Range or sample size shown |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| supereo ours | Recommendation rate | Share of the last 4 weeks of answers that recommend you, as answers out of every 100, with a 95% range (1.96 standard errors either side) | An answer that "offers you as something to buy or use" | Yes: a range on every rate, labeled Solid, Rough or Early |
| Semrush | AI Visibility, 0 to 100 | "How often your brand is mentioned in AI-generated answers compared to the median number of mentions for your top industry competitors" | A prompt whose answer includes you | Not described |
| Ahrefs | Mentions; AI Share of Voice | A mention is counted once per answer that names you; share of voice is your "percentage share of impressions" (Google search volume of the prompts you appear in) against tracked brands | Named at least once | Not described |
| HubSpot AEO | Brand visibility score | "How often your brand appears in AI answers across your tracked prompts, expressed as a percentage" | Named | Not described |
| HubSpot AI Search Grader | Score out of 100 | Sentiment 40, presence quality 20, brand recognition 20, share of voice 10, market competition 10 | Graded from how models describe you, not counted per answer | Not described |
| Peec AI | Visibility | "(Number of responses mentioning your brand / Total responses) × 100"; win rate counts answers where you're ranked first | Named | Not described |
| Profound | Visibility score | Runs mentioning your brand over runs mentioning any brand, per model, then averaged with equal weight; runs that name no brand are left out | Named | Not described |
| SE Visible | Visibility | Each mention weighted by position, (brands named − your position + 1) / brands named, averaged over every response, misses counting 0 | Named, worth more when earlier | Not described |
| Mangools | AI Search Score, 0 to 100 | Visibility (prompts where you're in the top 20) and average position, weighted by each model's market share | Named in the top 20 | Not described |
| Otterly.AI | Brand Visibility Index | Brand coverage against a "Likelihood to Buy" calculated from your average position, sorted into Leaders, Niche, Low Conversion and Low Performance | Named, and where | Not described |
Sources, read November 8, 2026: Semrush, Ahrefs, HubSpot AEO, HubSpot grader, Peec AI, Profound, SE Visible, Mangools, Otterly.AI, supereo. "Not described" means the pages we read don't say how many answers sit behind a score or how far it could move by chance.
Peec AI's win rate comes closest to a recommendation count: it counts answers where you're ranked first, ahead of every other brand named. First in a list and recommended can differ, though. An answer can list you first and still tell the buyer to pick someone else.
To see how far apart these formulas land, we ran one made-up set of ten answers through each tool's published formula. Nothing here is real data; it's the same ten answers scored seven ways.
| Answer | Brands named | Your position | Mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 | 1st | R C |
| 2 | 5 | 1st | M |
| 3 | 6 | 5th | M |
| 4 | 4 | none | N |
| 5 | 7 | 2nd | M |
| 6 | 6 | 6th | M |
| 7 | 5 | none | N |
| 8 | 3 | 1st | R |
| 9 | 6 | none | N |
| 10 | 0 | none | N |
| Score | The arithmetic | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Peec AI visibility; HubSpot AEO visibility | Named in 6 of 10 answers | 60% |
| Profound visibility score | Named in 6 of the 9 answers that name any brand | 67% |
| SE Visible visibility | Position weights 1.00 + 1.00 + 0.33 + 0.86 + 0.17 + 1.00, over 10 answers | 44% |
| Peec AI win rate | Ranked first in 3 of 10 | 30% |
| Peec AI share of voice | 6 of the 48 brand mentions | 13% |
| Ahrefs mentions | Answers that name you | 6 |
| Recommendation rate ours | Recommended in 2 of 10; 95% range 6 to 51 | 20 in 100 |
Our arithmetic, using each vendor's formula as published. Semrush and Mangools need competitor and model data the example doesn't have, so they're left out. The range is a 95% Wilson interval.
The same ten answers read as 67, 60, 44, 30 or 13 depending on the tool, while two of them tell the buyer to pick you. And with only ten answers, that two could mean anything from 6 to 51 in 100. A score with no range attached can't tell those apart.
Every visibility formula above counts you as soon as you're named. Being one of six names is the usual case: when we asked AI engines for the best AEO tools on November 7, 2026, the median answer named six tools, across 109 answers.
“Mentioned, cited and recommended are three different things. Most dashboards blend them into one number.”The CSwift on LinkedIn · Nov 8, 2026 · Read the post
What helpssupereo keeps them apart: each answer gets three calls (named, recommended, cited), and the recommendation rate leads.
None of the vendor pages we read says how many answers sit behind a score or how far it could swing by chance. supereo labels each rate Solid (within 5 answers in 100 either side), Rough (within 10) or Early (wider, shown as a range with no number).
“I also prefer showing 'named 4 of 6' rather than turning it into a 67% visibility score. Same data, but much harder to accidentally overstate the precision.”u/OTW-Motion on r/SEO_LLM · Sep 2, 2026 · Read the post
What helpsThat's how supereo reports a rate: answers out of every 100, with the range beside it.
A score can only describe the questions behind it. Questions that name your brand push any mention rate up, and a list someone made up may not be what buyers ask.
“Most tools measure against a list the vendor or client made up, so the score describes the list, not the market.”The CSwift on LinkedIn · Nov 8, 2026 · Read the post
What helpssupereo writes your buyers' questions from your own site, you confirm them before tracking starts, and questions that name you are reported apart from the rate.
“…you're tracking whatever queries you guessed at, not what people are actually typing.”u/BeautifulDesign2928 on r/GenerativeSEOstrategy · Sep 17, 2026 · Read the post
Product names, old names and misspellings change the count without anything changing in the answers.
“Same prompts, same engines, two consecutive days, my score moved 77 to 94 purely because I started counting product names as brand mentions.”u/erdemgezer on r/GenerativeSEOstrategy · Sep 16, 2026 · Read the post
A recommendation rate is the share of answers to your buyers' questions that recommend you. To make it a number you can act on, three rules from supereo's published method:
You can compute the same thing by hand from a grade sheet: the step-by-step audit shows how, with a worked example.
Public posts, copied word for word with links, complaints first. Individual posts, not a survey.
“…most aeo tools feel like basic wrappers that just make up an arbitrary visibility score.”u/LaimerMalefice on r/DigitalMarketing · Oct 23, 2026 · Read the post
What helpsEvery mark supereo gives comes with the answer it was read from, so the number can be checked.
“Semrush does that too and it always feels like a vanity metric.”u/evolkween on r/DigitalMarketing · Jul 15, 2026 · Read the post · "That" is a single percentage visibility score
“a raw visibility score on its own is close to meaningless, same issue as tracking social impressions with nothing tied to outcomes.”u/HumanBehavi0ur on r/b2bmarketing · Sep 28, 2026 · Read the post
“…just counting how many times your brand gets mentioned can turn into a vanity metric pretty fast.”u/bayouski on r/b2bmarketing · Sep 28, 2026 · Read the post
What helpsThat's why supereo leads with recommendations and reports mentions beside them.
“a visibility score without that context is mostly a vanity metric.”u/jeniferjenni on r/aeo · Oct 30, 2026 · Read the post
What helpssupereo's audit shows every answer behind its marks, and Copilot turns the gaps into page-by-page changes.
“If someone promises an exact “AI visibility score,” ask how they sampled, how many runs, and what they checked it against.”The CSwift on LinkedIn · Nov 8, 2026 · Read the post
What helpssupereo publishes how it samples, how often it asks and how wide each range is, on its method page.
A number that sums up how often AI answers include your brand. At most tools it's the share of answers that name you (Peec AI, HubSpot AEO, Profound), sometimes weighted by position (SE Visible, Mangools) or set against competitors (Semrush). It counts mentions, not recommendations.
It depends on the tool. Peec AI divides responses that mention you by all responses; Profound divides runs that mention you by runs that mention any brand; SE Visible weights each mention by position; Semrush compares your mentions with your top competitors' median. The table above has each formula from the vendor's docs.
There's no shared benchmark: each vendor scales its own score, and the same answers can score 13 or 67 depending on the formula. Compare a score only with itself, on the same questions, over time, and look at the recommendation rate beside it.
No. AI visibility counts how often a brand shows up anywhere in an AI answer, often as one name in a list of six. Being recommended means the answer tells the buyer to pick you. supereo reports both, and leads with its recommendation rate: the share of answers to your buyers' questions that recommend you, with its range.
Each tool asks different questions on different engines and counts a different thing: a mention, a position-weighted mention, or your share against competitors. Run on the same ten answers, the formulas above give 13 to 67.
Your share of all brand mentions in the answers. Peec AI divides your mentions by all brand mentions; Ahrefs divides your impressions (the Google search volume behind the prompts you appear in) by all tracked brands'. It's comparative, so it moves when competitors are added or removed.
The share of answers to your buyers' questions that recommend you, shown as answers out of every 100 with its range. It leaves out questions that name your brand and counts only answers that offer you as something to buy or use.
We read each vendor's metric documentation on November 8, 2026 and quote the formulas as published. The ten-answer example is invented to show the arithmetic and says so. The six-tools median comes from our own run of AEO-tool questions on six engines on November 7, 2026. Full method.
More: the free AEO grader · HubSpot's AEO Grader · run an audit by hand