Practical Experiments in AI Search Visibility
John Greer Being recommended by an AI system sounds like a good result for a business. But what exactly was the customer told about that business? An AI answer might simply provide a name. It might explain convincingly why the business fits the customer’s needs. Or it might produce a highly detailed, persuasive recommendation where some of … Read more
A business appearing in an AI-generated answer is useful. Being recommended may be better still. But there is another question that receives much less attention: Once AI recommends a business, does it give the customer a practical route towards that business? That is the P — Pathway part of our RAMP Framework. We decided to … Read more
AI visibility testing can be carried out manually. In fact, I think there is considerable value in starting that way. Running searches yourself helps you understand what you are actually measuring, how much AI-generated answers can change, the difference between a mention, recommendation and citation, and why the prompts you choose matter so much. But … Read more
Choosing which prompts to test is one of the most important parts of AI visibility testing. It is also one of the easiest parts to overcomplicate. You could generate 100 questions about your business. You could collect keywords, variations and long-tail searches. You could ask an AI tool to suggest dozens more. But a long … Read more
AI visibility testing is the process of checking how a business, brand, product or website appears in AI-generated answers. That can include Google AI Mode, ChatGPT and other AI search platforms. At first, the obvious question seems to be: Does my business appear? But a single AI answer can be misleading. A business may be … Read more
A single AI search can hide a surprising amount of complexity. Ask Google AI Mode something like: “I’m looking for an accountant in Birmingham for a manufacturing business that uses Xero. Which accountancy firms should I consider, and why?” To the person asking the question, that is one search. But answering it well may require … Read more
Choosing which prompts to monitor is one of the most important parts of AI visibility testing. It is also easy to overcomplicate. You could ask an AI tool to generate 100 questions about your business. You could collect phrases from search tools. You could create dozens of slight variations of the same query. But none … Read more
It is tempting to reduce AI visibility to a number. You test 50 prompts. Your business appears in 18 answers. Your AI visibility is 36%. That number may be useful. But on its own, it tells you surprisingly little. Which prompts did you appear for? Were they broad research questions or searches from someone close … Read more
One of the hardest questions in AI visibility testing comes before you run a single test: Which prompts should you actually monitor? It is easy to type a few obvious questions into ChatGPT, Google AI Mode or another AI search platform and start recording which businesses appear. But a handful of obvious prompts may tell … Read more
While looking more closely at NOLA Marketing after our recent discussion of the NOLA/OtterlyAI case study, I came across an article by Emily Matthews that connected particularly strongly with several things we have been observing in our own AI visibility tests. The article is What Is a Query Fan-Out in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?. Emily … Read more