--- title: "What AI visibility is · PolarJay" description: "AI visibility is whether AI assistants name your company when someone asks about what you sell. Optimizing for it is called GEO." url: https://polarjay.com/en/what-is-ai-visibility lang: en alternate: https://polarjay.com/que-es-la-visibilidad-en-ia published: 2026-10-23 author: PolarJay updated: 2026-10-23 publisher: POLARGATE S.L. (CIF B24895005) --- Guide # What AI visibility is AI visibility is whether ChatGPT, Claude and the other assistants name your company when someone asks them about what you sell without saying your name. Published on 23 October 2026 by PolarJay Last updated: 23 October 2026 ## What is AI visibility? AI visibility is the share of an AI assistant's answers that include your company when the question does not name it. If a buyer types “which company would you recommend to refurbish a hotel in Madrid” into ChatGPT and the answer names five, those five are visible for that question. Everyone else is not. It comes down to three numbers, always on questions that leave your name out: - **Presence**: how many of the answers include you. - **Position**: where the AI puts you in its list, when it names you. - **Sources**: which pages the AI reads to answer, and whether any of them is yours or mentions you. It matters because more and more purchases start with a question to an AI rather than a search with ten links. The AI answers with a short list, and if you are not on it you are not in the running. In our measurement on 23 October 2026, OtterlyAI came up in 31 of 104 category answers about AI visibility tools, and PolarJay in 0. The data is in the [study](https://polarjay.com/en/research/ai-visibility-tools-ai-assistants-recommend). AI visibility is not the same as being well known. An AI can know you and still not recommend you: give it your name and it describes you well, but ask about your category and it names others. We saw it in a real measurement of a hotel construction company: it appeared in 2 of 40 questions, and only when the question named it. The [guide to measuring AI visibility](https://polarjay.com/en/guides/measure-ai-visibility) goes through it. Nor is it a fixed number. Answers change from one day to the next: between two of our measurements 12 days apart, the list of recommended tools changed in 71 of 104 answers. That is why you measure with many questions and at regular intervals, never with a single question. ## What is GEO (generative engine optimization)? GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work, on your website and beyond it, that gets AI assistants to name and cite you when they answer. The term comes from a 2023 research paper, [GEO: Generative Engine Optimization](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735), by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors, accepted at KDD 2024. The paper calls generative engines the search tools that, instead of a list of links, read several sources and write an answer with a language model. The authors built a benchmark, GEO-bench, with questions on many topics and the pages that answer them, and tested which changes to a page make the engine use it more. According to their abstract, GEO can lift a source's visibility in answers by up to 40%, and what works varies by topic. The changes they tested include citing sources, adding quotes from experts and adding statistics. For a company, GEO turns into concrete things: - AI crawlers can get in and read your website without JavaScript. The [guide to AI crawlers](https://polarjay.com/en/guides/ai-crawlers) explains how to check. - Your website says plainly what you sell, to whom, where and at what price, in the language people search in. - Each important page answers one specific question, with the answer up front and facts that can be quoted. - Other people's pages (comparisons, directories, press, forums) name you alongside your category. - Your structured data (JSON-LD) says who you are, so the AI does not mix you up with a company with a similar name. It also goes by AEO (answer engine optimization), LLMO or SEO for AI. Different names for the same work. ## How is GEO different from SEO? SEO aims to get your page to the top of a list of links; GEO aims to get your company inside the answer the AI writes. They share the technical groundwork, but what you win and how you measure it are different. | | SEO | GEO | | --- | --- | --- | | What you win | A spot in the results list and a click | A mention or a citation inside the answer | | What you measure | Rank, impressions and clicks per keyword | Presence, position and sources per question, in each AI and each language | | Who reads the page | Googlebot and Bingbot | Those two plus GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others | | What the query looks like | Two or three words | A whole question, often with context | | How fast it changes | Rankings move slowly | Answers change from one day to the next | What stays the same: a website a search engine cannot crawl will not be read by an AI either. Google says so in its documentation on [AI features in Search](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features): there are no extra technical requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and SEO fundamentals still apply. What changes is how much other people's pages count. In SEO one well-ranked page can be enough; in GEO the AI pulls several sources together before it answers. In our category questions, the most-read sources were otterly.ai, semrush.com and ahrefs.com. What the AI reads about your category is mostly written by others. And measuring changes. In SEO you check your rank for a keyword in one search engine. In GEO you have to ask many questions, to several AIs, in each language, and repeat them, because a single answer tells you almost nothing. The [guide to measuring AI visibility](https://polarjay.com/en/guides/measure-ai-visibility) shows how. ## Where to start 1. Run the [free scanner](https://polarjay.com/en/scan), which runs 12 checks on whether an AI can read your home page and asks ChatGPT, with web search, 3 buyer questions. It is free and needs no sign-up. 2. Write down the questions a buyer who does not know you yet would ask, without your name and in your customers' language. 3. If you do not show up, find out why with the [guide to why ChatGPT doesn't mention your company](https://polarjay.com/en/guides/why-chatgpt-does-not-mention-my-company). 4. Fix what you find and ask the same questions again after a while. ## Sources - [Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735, KDD 2024)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735) - [Google, AI features and your website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) ## Keep reading - [How to measure AI visibility](https://polarjay.com/en/guides/measure-ai-visibility): To find out whether ChatGPT and Claude recommend you, ask them your buyer's questions without your name and count whom they name. - [Why ChatGPT doesn't mention your company](https://polarjay.com/en/guides/why-chatgpt-does-not-mention-my-company): The usual reasons ChatGPT leaves a company out and what to change. - [Which AI crawlers can read your website](https://polarjay.com/en/guides/ai-crawlers): GPTBot, ClaudeBot and the other AI crawlers read your site if your robots.txt lets them in. This is how to check. ## Does ChatGPT name you? Check now One minute, no sign-up. [Scan my website for free](https://polarjay.com/en/scan) [Request the free trial](https://polarjay.com/en/trial)