AI search visibility: does ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity mention you?

You rank on page 1 in Google. Yet when someone asks ChatGPT who the best provider in your market is, you are not mentioned. Your competitor is. That is not a bug but a new playing field, with different rules than search engine optimisation.

AI search visibility is the measurable outcome: are you mentioned in AI answers, how often, and in what context. We measure that outcome, and more importantly: we tell you why you are absent.

What AI search visibility is (and how it relates to SEO)

Recent years produced a jungle of terms: AEO (answer engine optimisation), generative engine optimization (GEO), AI SEO, LLM optimisation. All of them try to capture the same phenomenon: people ask AI systems instead of Google, and those systems decide who gets mentioned.

Term	Meaning	Relation
SEO	Being found in traditional search results	Shared technical base (crawlability, structured data)
AEO	Optimised for direct-answer formats	Large overlap: content structure and FAQ formats
Generative engine optimization (GEO)	Optimised for generative AI answers	The method
AI search visibility	The measurable outcome: are you mentioned in AI answers?	The KPI; the other terms are methods

AI search visibility is not an optimisation method. It is the result you measure. There is no page 2 in ChatGPT: you are mentioned, or you do not exist in the answer. That is why measuring comes first: without a measurement you do not know whether you have a problem, let alone which one.

What we measure: 4 platforms plus the reason for your absence

A Lens measurement pins a fixed set of questions for your market (5 by default, expandable to 25) and asks them on 4 platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Per question and platform we record whether you are mentioned, which sources the platform consulted and cited, and which competitors do appear.

The difference is the layer underneath. Since September 2026 the measurement also captures the platform's own search behaviour per answer: did the model search the web or answer from its own knowledge, which search queries did it fire, and which sources did it read. That lets us classify every non-mention:

• No search performed. The model answered from its own knowledge, without a web search. No page could have been found at that moment; that is a property of the question and the model, not a content problem.
• Not found when searching. The platform did search, but your site was not among the sources it consulted. This is where content, indexing and external mentions make the difference.
• Read but not cited. The platform had your page in hand and chose another source. Then it is about the content and citability of that page.

Those three categories require different work. Mixing them up means optimising blindly.

What a measurement delivers

• A score from 0 to 100 following our public methodology (scoring v3.2), built from citation, technical and content.
• Per question and platform: mentioned or not, with the consulted and cited sources.
• Per non-mention the cause category above, with the measured model and the search queries it fired.
• The competitors and sources that do appear on your questions: that is your work list.
• With repeated measurements: the trend, on exactly the same pinned question set, so differences are attributable to the outside world or your intervention, not to a changed questionnaire.

What a measurement looks like: our own numbers

We measure hiveminds.nl itself, with the same pipeline we use for clients. The most recent numbers (measurement set: 5 questions, 3 measurements between 4 and 6 September 2026, per-platform configuration as stated):

• ChatGPT (gpt-4o-2024-08-06 via the Responses API, search tool available) did not search the web for 4 of the 5 questions, in all 3 measurements. For those questions no content route existed at that moment.
• Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6 with web search) fired 13 to 15 search queries per measurement and consulted 93 to 120 sources, of which 38 to 46 were cited.
• Perplexity (sonar-pro) consulted 96 to 99 sources per measurement and quoted 52 to 57 of them in the text.
• Across the 3 measurements ChatGPT and Claude recorded 32 unique search queries. In 0 of them a hiveminds page appeared among the consulted sources; 184 other domains did. On the question about a digital strategy agency in Utrecht, Claude consulted sortlist.nl and digitalinside.nl, among others.
• There were 0 cases where a hiveminds page was read but not cited. Our gap sits entirely in being found, not in being rejected.

That is the kind of conclusion a measurement sharpens: we now know content work and indexing are our route, and that a citability problem does not (currently) exist. What the conclusion is for your site, you only know after a measurement. The full analysis of these 3 measurements, including the numbers that argue against our trade, is in Is generative engine optimization worth it? What 3 measurements showed (2026).

Frequently asked questions

Is AI search visibility the same as SEO? No. SEO targets positions in search results. AI search visibility measures whether you are mentioned in AI-generated answers. The technical base overlaps, but the signals that matter differ, and so does the measurement method.

Can an agency guarantee that ChatGPT mentions me? No. The models cannot be steered and sometimes they do not search at all; nobody can force that. What is possible: measuring where you stand, determining which category your absence falls into, and working on the cases where content and indexing make the difference.

Does this work for every type of business? The impact differs. For service providers and knowledge-intensive businesses it is directly relevant. For businesses running purely on local foot traffic it is less urgent, but search behaviour is shifting there too.

How fast do you see results after optimisation? It depends on the cause category. Indexing and content fixes can become visible within weeks on platforms that search live. For questions where the model does not search there is no content route; an honest measurement report says so.

Want to know where you stand?

Request a free AI Visibility Snapshot. We measure your mentions on a fixed question set across 4 AI platforms and show which competitors are mentioned, and why you are not (yet).

→ Request your free Snapshot