Search engine optimisation is the work of getting a page to rank for a query. AI visibility is the work of getting a brand named in the answer to a question. They start from the same keyword data and end in different places, and most of what a team knows from one carries over to the other — but not all of it, and the parts that do not are the parts that cost money.
The result is an answer, not a list
A search result is ten links and a reader who picks one. An AI answer is a paragraph that names three to five brands, cites a few pages, and is read as a recommendation. There is no position two; there is named or not named, and, if named, how. That is why the figures are visibility, share of voice, position within the answer and sentiment, rather than a rank.
What carries over: the keyword data
The same keywords, volumes, bids and intents that rank tracking runs on still describe the market — what people are asking about, and what a buyer of each intent is worth. We use exactly that data, but to price the questions rather than to track positions: a keyword is worth its monthly searches, times the share of clicks a top result takes, times what advertisers bid for it. Summed over a category, that is what the market pays to own the intents a brand competes on, and it is the denominator every visibility figure needs. A brand can be highly visible on a corner of its category worth very little.
What carries over: the technical half
An engine has to be allowed in, has to read the page correctly, and has to be able to quote it. Each of those is an old SEO discipline with a new reader:
- robots.txt, checked against the AI crawlers by name — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and the rest — rather than against Googlebot alone. A site that shuts a retrieval crawler out of one path has made a decision; a site that shuts it out everywhere has opted out of the answer.
- Markup a chunker can follow: one H1, heading levels that step down one at a time, an article element that says where the content begins and ends, a canonical that points at the page itself, a machine-readable publish date. Fifteen such rules, run across every page in the sitemap.
- Content served in the HTML, not assembled by a script after the page loads. Most AI crawlers do not run scripts; a page that is empty until they do is empty to them.
What does not carry over
Rank tracking. Nothing here is derived from a search position, because the thing being measured is an answer. Backlink counting, too: what matters is which sources the engine actually leaned on for this question, and those are read off the answer, not off a link graph. And the sources are not the ones a search result would show. Over the answers we hold, the pages engines cite split into a few kinds — editorial, reference, community threads, other companies' sites, and the brand's own — and the mix is different for every category. Being absent from the roundup an engine keeps citing is a gap; being absent from a directory it never reads is not.
How the work is different
Ranking work is measured by movement on a results page. Visibility work is measured by re-asking the question. A gap — a source that feeds the answer and skips you — becomes a ticket; when the ticket is closed, the reading on the prompts it targets is frozen, and fourteen days later the same prompts are asked again on fresh answers only. The verdict is recorded whichever way it goes. Without that, the report is a percentage nobody can act on, and the meeting is an argument about whether the number is real.
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