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Overview

Source Visibility answers a narrower question than your AIS Score: of the runs where your brand was mentioned, how many also cited your own website as a source? It’s the difference between being talked about and being linked to.
Source Visibility is a sibling metric — it is calculated and shown alongside your AIS Score, but it is not one of the four signals in the composite. See AIS Score for the four weighted signals that do make up the composite.
Being mentioned and being cited are genuinely different outcomes. An AI platform can name your brand favourably in its answer while citing a competitor’s comparison page, a review site, or a third-party publication for the supporting detail — you show up in the text, but the trust signal (the link) goes elsewhere. Source Visibility tracks the second half of that picture on its own.

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How it’s calculated

Source Visibility is the share of your mentioned runs — not all runs — where at least one cited source resolves to a domain you own:
Only runs where your brand was mentioned enter the calculation at all; runs where you weren’t mentioned are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator, because there’s no mention for a citation to sit alongside. A run counts once toward the numerator regardless of how many of your own pages it cited within that single answer — citing your homepage and your pricing page in the same response still counts as one run with an own-domain citation, not two. “Your own domain” means the domain(s) configured for your brand. A cited URL is matched against that list by extracting its host and checking it against your owned domains — a link to www.yourbrand.com/blog/post counts, a link to a subdomain you don’t own doesn’t. Malformed or unparseable cited URLs are skipped rather than counted either way.
If a brand has no owned domains configured, or has no mentioned runs at all yet, Source Visibility shows as 0 rather than an undefined state — there’s no own-domain citation possible to detect either way.

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Why it matters

A high AIS Score with a low Source Visibility is a specific, actionable pattern: AI platforms already recommend you, but they’re routing the “why should I trust this” citation to someone else’s page instead of yours. That usually means a competitor, a review site, or a comparison article has more citable, AI-readable content on the topic than your own site does — worth checking against your Citations & Source Opportunities list to see exactly which domains are winning the citation instead of you. Because Source Visibility only ever measures mentioned runs, it moves independently of your AIS Score. Adding prompts, competitors, or countries changes the denominator behind your AIS signals (see Why scores move) but affects Source Visibility only insofar as it changes which runs you’re mentioned in — a genuinely different kind of movement worth reading on its own terms rather than alongside your headline number.

Visibility

Are you mentioned at all — the metric Source Visibility’s denominator depends on.

AIS Score

The four-signal composite Source Visibility sits alongside, not inside.

Citations & Source Opportunities

See exactly which domains are being cited instead of yours, and what to do about it.

Mentions vs citations

The underlying distinction between a prose mention and a citation link.