> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.surfais.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Visibility

> The presence-led core of your AIS Score: how often you're mentioned, and how consistently across platforms.

## Overview

Visibility measures whether your brand shows up in AI answers at all — how often you're mentioned across your tracked prompts, and how consistently that happens across the five platforms individually. It's the largest component of the [AIS Score](/metrics/ais-score) by a wide margin, because every other signal depends on it: a brand that isn't mentioned can't be well-positioned, can't be praised, and can't hold a share of a conversation it isn't part of.

## How it's calculated

Visibility carries 60 of the AIS Score's 100 points, split into two sub-components:

```
Visibility = (Presence × 45 + Platform breadth × 15) / 60
```

**Presence (45 of the 60 points)** is your mention rate: the share of scan runs where your brand was mentioned by name, out of every prompt × platform × country combination scanned.

```
Presence = mentioned runs / total runs × 100
```

Brand detection uses deterministic, word-boundary-safe matching against your brand name and its spelling variants (so "Perfect Draft" and "PerfectDraft" both count), applied to URL-stripped answer text — a citation link to your own domain counts as a citation, not a prose mention. See [Mentions vs citations](/analysis/mentions-vs-citations) for that distinction.

**Platform breadth (15 of the 60 points)** is the mean of your mention rate calculated *separately for each of the five platforms*, then averaged. This is continuous, not a pass/fail check — a single stray mention on one platform doesn't count that platform as "covered." A platform contributes exactly as much as your actual mention rate on it.

```
Platform breadth = mean(presence on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews)
```

Unlike Position and Sentiment, Visibility applies no credibility shrinkage — presence and breadth are measured directly from every run, mentioned or not, so there's no when-present sampling bias to correct for.

<Note>
  Visibility is the one signal that's unconditional: it's measured whether or not you're mentioned. Position, Sentiment, and Share of Voice only have something to measure once Visibility has established that you show up.
</Note>

## Why it matters

Because Visibility is 60% of the composite, it's usually the biggest lever on your AIS Score — and the one most worth diagnosing first if your score is lower than expected. A low Visibility score with strong Position and Sentiment (when you do appear, you're ranked well and framed positively) points to a coverage problem: your prompts aren't triggering a mention often enough, or one platform is dragging the average down. That's a different fix from a low Position or Sentiment score, which points to a quality problem once you're already showing up.

Adding prompts, adding countries, or adjusting your [brand aliases](/setup/brand-aliases) can all move Visibility — sometimes in ways that look like a score drop but are really a denominator change. See [Why scores move](/metrics/why-scores-move) before reading too much into a single-period shift.

## Related metrics

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="AIS Score" href="/metrics/ais-score">
    How Visibility combines with the other three signals into the headline number.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Position" href="/metrics/position">
    Where you rank among all brands named, once you're mentioned.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Mentions vs citations" href="/analysis/mentions-vs-citations">
    The distinction between a prose mention and a citation link.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>