You're losing deals and you don't even know it.
Someone asks ChatGPT for a tool recommendation in your exact category. Your competitor gets mentioned. You don't. That person signs up with your competitor, and you have no idea this interaction ever happened.
That's the AI visibility problem in a nutshell.
What AI visibility actually means
AI visibility is simple: how often do AI tools mention your brand when people ask relevant questions?
It's not like Google rankings where you're #3 or #7. With AI, it's closer to binary. You're either in the answer or you're not. And if you're in, the quality matters too. Being the top recommendation with a glowing description is very different from being mentioned fifth with a lukewarm "some people also try..."
Why this is a bigger deal than it sounds
When AI mentions you, it's not neutral. It's essentially saying "I looked at the options and here's what I'd suggest." Users treat that differently than a list of search results they have to evaluate themselves.
Think about how you use ChatGPT. When it recommends something, do you go check 5 other options? Probably not. You trust the recommendation and move on. Your potential customers do the same.
The scariest part? This happens constantly, and you can't see it in your analytics. There's no "ChatGPT" row in your traffic sources for all the deals you're losing.
The tricky thing about measuring AI visibility
AI visibility isn't one number. It depends on context.
Which prompts? You might show up for "best CRM for consultants" but disappear for "best CRM for agencies." Different questions, different answers.
Which AI tools? ChatGPT might love you while Claude ignores you. Each model has different training data and different behaviors.
How are you mentioned? First recommendation or fifth? Enthusiastic endorsement or neutral listing? These details matter for conversion.
How consistent is it? AI responses vary. Run the same prompt twice, you might get different results. Being mentioned 8 times out of 10 is very different from 2 out of 10.
Checking your own AI visibility
The manual approach: open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. Ask the prompts your customers would ask. See if you appear.
The problem: you can't sustainably check 50 prompts across 5 platforms every week. And even if you could, you'd have no historical data to spot trends.
This is what tools like Mentionable solve. Define the prompts that matter (or let us suggest them based on your URL), and we track your visibility across AI platforms continuously. You see where you're winning, where you're ghosted, and how it changes over time.
Building better AI visibility
The good news is the fundamentals overlap with what you're probably already doing for content marketing.
Create comprehensive content that actually answers questions. Thin, surface-level pages don't get cited. Depth and expertise do.
Make it obvious what you do and who you help. AI needs to understand your entity clearly before it can confidently recommend you.
Build authority the old-fashioned way. Get mentioned on reputable sites. Earn coverage. These signals help AI trust you enough to recommend you.
Keep things fresh. For AI tools that search in real-time, recently updated content gets prioritized.
The new reality
For years, organic rankings were the metric that mattered. Now there's a parallel channel that works differently, and most businesses are flying blind.
The businesses that track and optimize their AI visibility will capture customers that their competitors don't even know exist.