Glossary

AI Visibility

AI visibility is how often and how favorably assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity mention a business in response to recommendation questions. Measure it by asking representative buyer questions and recording the answers, sources, dates, and sample size.

When a buyer asks an assistant "who should I hire?", the answer may name a small set of businesses and explain the choices. AI visibility measures whether and how a business appears in those answers.

Ask assistants representative customer questions with web search enabled, then record which businesses appear, how often they appear, and which sources support the answers. Routeless research applies this method across six trades and five metros. The free AI visibility report samples one business.

Consistent business data, recent reviews, and pages that state facts clearly can support both search and AI visibility. AI visibility varies by answer, so traditional rank tracking does not measure it directly.

An answer sample shows whether recommendations concentrate around a few businesses or vary widely. Across 30 sampled markets, differences between trades were larger than differences between cities. Dental markets scored 80–90 on the Routeless openness score in each metro, indicating dispersed recommendations in the sample. Plumbing and roofing markets clustered in the low 60s and repeated a smaller set of names.

Track the business name, position in the answer, explanation, and cited sources separately. A single total can hide whether visibility improved through more mentions or stronger recommendations.

Assistants are non-deterministic, so report the sample size and date with every figure. Also separate mention frequency from recommendation strength. A name included in a list of five is different from a business the assistant leads with and explains. The raw answers show that context, which is why the research publishes them with the summary.

Related terms
  • Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a business easy for AI assistants and answer features to quote and recommend: publishing direct, factual, well-structured answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and voice assistants can lift and attribute.
  • AI Citations AI citations are the sources an assistant links or names in support of an answer.
  • AI Recommendation Openness AI recommendation openness is a Routeless 0-100 summary of how widely business names were distributed across 18 sampled AI answers.

See where your business stands.

The free AI visibility report shows what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say when buyers ask about your market — with the sources behind every answer.

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