Your AI visibility score measures how often AI engines mention your brand. Here's exactly how to calculate it, what a good score looks like, and how to improve it.
Your AI visibility score — also called your [MentionShare](/features/mentionshare) — is the percentage of AI engine responses that mention your brand for your target prompts. It answers the question: when buyers ask AI engines about your category, how often is your brand part of the answer?
This is fundamentally different from traditional search visibility. A #1 Google ranking tells you how often people click through to your page. Your AI visibility score tells you how often AI engines recommend your brand when buyers are actively making purchase decisions.
MentionShare uses a simple formula:
MentionShare = (brand mentions / total AI responses) × 100
For example: you track 20 prompts across 5 AI engines (100 total response slots). Your brand appears in 30 of those 100 responses. Your MentionShare is 30%.
The key nuance: a mention counts only when an AI engine recommends or recognizes your brand as a relevant solution for the prompt. Appearing in a parenthetical list alongside a dozen competitors does not count the same as being the primary recommendation.
Different from sentiment — a mention does not equal a recommendation. Use [sentiment analysis](/features/sentiment-analysis) to understand whether AI engines are actively endorsing your brand or merely acknowledging it.
There's no universal benchmark, but these ranges reflect what TrueCite sees across categories:
The trend matters more than the absolute number. A score rising from 8% to 14% to 22% over three months shows compounding momentum.
The manual method: Run your 10 target prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Record: mentioned (yes/no), sentiment (positive/neutral/negative), position (1st recommendation, 2nd, buried). Calculate your mention rate per engine. Limitation: time-consuming, not scalable, produces no trend data.
The automated method: TrueCite runs your entire prompt library across all 9 AI engines simultaneously, stores results, and shows your MentionShare trend over time. Scheduled scans run automatically so you see changes weekly without manual work. [Start your first scan](/sign-up) in 60 seconds.
Recommended scan frequency: weekly for most teams. Daily if you're in an active optimization sprint. Monthly is the bare minimum to detect meaningful changes.
1. FAQ schema on your pages. FAQPage JSON-LD is the single highest-leverage change for most brands. AI engines extract Q&A content directly from schema — pages without it are at a structural disadvantage.
2. Entity clarity. If AI engines don't have a clear picture of who you are — G2 profile, Crunchbase entry, LinkedIn company page, Organization schema with sameAs links — they can't confidently recommend you.
3. Brand mentions on authoritative third-party sites. G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, industry publications. AI engines cross-reference third-party sources before recommending brands. More authoritative citations = higher confidence recommendation.
4. Answer-first content structure. Your key pages should lead with a direct answer to the implied question, not a company description. AI engines extract the opening sentence most reliably.
5. Competitor activity. If competitors publish better-optimized content, your relative score drops even if your absolute mentions hold steady. Use [Competitor Intelligence](/features/competitor-intelligence) to monitor when competitors are gaining ground.
The fastest path to MentionShare improvement is publishing FAQ blocks and structured data for your highest-gap prompts. TrueCite's [Fix Generator](/features/fix-generator) analyzes where AI engines are skipping your brand and generates the exact FAQ content needed to close the gap.
For a full improvement playbook, read [How to Improve Your MentionShare Score](/blog/mention-share-improve). Most teams see measurable score improvement within 4–6 weeks of publishing structured fixes.
[Start measuring your AI visibility score today](/sign-up) — your baseline MentionShare scan takes 60 seconds and shows exactly where you stand across all AI engines.