Your brand's visibility is shifting from blue links to AI answers. And most marketing leaders have no idea how they're performing.
After 20 years in search, spanning Google, TripAdvisor, and running search strategy at MediaCom and IPG for brands like LEGO, Adidas and Shell, I've watched every major algorithm shift. But this one's different. ChatGPT and Gemini aren't ranking websites. They're citing brands directly. Your content either makes the cut or it doesn't.
The problem? Most brands are flying blind. They're still optimising for Google's first page whilst AI models are already deciding which 3-5 brands deserve to be mentioned at all.
So we built a scorecard. Ten questions that separate brands winning the answer economy from those being systematically erased.
The Foundation Layer: Can You Even Compete?
These first three questions determine whether you're in the game at all.
1. Can you measure your visibility in ChatGPT and Gemini?
If you're not tracking AI citations, you're managing in the dark. Traditional rank tracking is increasingly insufficient when 60% of Google searches end without a click. You need to know: when prospects ask AI about your category, does your brand appear? How often? In what context?
Most marketing teams can't answer this. They're reporting on metrics from 2019 whilst their competitors are already optimising for language models.
2. Do you have "definitional" pages for your core terms?
AI models prioritise authoritative definitions. If someone asks "what is [your core product category]", do you have a page that directly answers that? Not a product page buried in sales copy. A clear, structured explanation that establishes expertise.
Banks without dedicated pages explaining "bridging loans" or "remortgaging" are losing citations to comparison sites. SaaS companies without clear "what is X" pages are being defined by industry blogs instead.
This is good SEO practice that directly transfers to AI visibility. Strong SEO foundations make your content retrievable by AI models in the first place.
3. Is your structured data implemented correctly?
Schema markup is no longer optional. It's how you explicitly tell AI models what your content means. Organisation schema, FAQ schema, product schema. These are the annotations that help language models understand and cite you accurately.
Bing's Fabrice Canel confirmed that schema markup directly helps Microsoft's LLMs understand content. Sites with structured data see a 30% improvement in AI response accuracy compared to those without.
I've seen brands with genuinely superior content get overlooked because they didn't bother with structured data. The AI couldn't parse what they were actually saying.
Competitive Position: Where Do You Stand?
Questions 4-5 assess your position relative to rivals.
4. Do you appear more or less than your top competitor?
In the old Google world, ranking position mattered. In AI, it's simpler and more brutal: are you mentioned or not? And if multiple brands are mentioned, are you first, third, or absent entirely?
Run 20 category-relevant prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. Count mentions. If your main competitor appears in 15 responses and you appear in 6, you're losing citation share. That gap compounds over time as AI models reinforce what they've previously learned.
5. Are you framed positively or neutrally?
This is where brand positioning shows up in AI outputs. Models don't just list brands randomly. They contextualise. "Best for enterprise teams" carries different weight than "another option to consider."
If you're consistently positioned as a fallback rather than a leader, your brand messaging isn't translating to AI training data. That's fixable, but only if you're measuring it. We call this your share of memory — how AI models remember and recommend you.
Citation Gravity: Does the Internet Endorse You?
The middle layer (questions 6-8) measures whether third-party sources validate your authority. This is where AI visibility goes beyond traditional SEO.
6. Do third-party sites cite you in comparison content?
AI models train on the entire web. If industry blogs, review sites, and comparison platforms consistently mention your brand, models learn to include you. If they don't, you're functionally invisible.
Research shows 91% of AI-generated answers cite third-party sources. Your own website accounts for just 9% of brand mentions in AI responses. This means "being part of the conversation" matters more than ever. Guest articles, expert commentary and case studies on partner sites all build citation gravity.
7. Are you mentioned in Wikipedia or industry reports?
Wikipedia and Reddit are among the most-cited sources in AI training data, with Reddit accounting for 40% of AI citations and Wikipedia 26%. Analyst reports from Gartner, Forrester, and category-specific research firms also carry significant weight. If your brand appears in these sources, language models are far more likely to cite you.
Most mid-market brands ignore this entirely. They assume Wikipedia is for enterprises or that analyst relations is too expensive. Meanwhile, their well-cited competitors are locking in AI visibility that compounds over time.
8. Have you earned PR in the last 90 days?
Fresh citations signal relevance. Brands that regularly appear in news articles, industry press, and trade publications maintain momentum. Brands that went quiet three years ago fade from AI responses, even if their product is objectively superior.
This doesn't mean press releases. It means actual earned coverage that journalists and bloggers cite naturally. Consistently appearing in high-quality editorial coverage is how AI systems learn to trust and recommend brands.
The Strategic Layer: Priority or Afterthought?
The final two questions reveal organisational readiness.
9. Do you track AI visibility as a KPI in exec reports?
If your board deck still shows Google rankings and organic traffic but no AI citation metrics, you're optimising for yesterday's game. Leadership needs to see: citation volume, share of voice in AI responses, competitive positioning in model outputs.
Until AI visibility sits alongside revenue and customer acquisition metrics, it won't get the investment it requires. AI Overviews reduce clicks to the top-ranking page by 58%. That's a board-level concern, not a marketing footnote.
10. Can you prove ROI of content using citation metrics?
Content marketing has always struggled with attribution. But AI citations offer a direct line: this article was cited 47 times by ChatGPT this quarter, resulting in tracked conversions from users who mentioned the AI recommendation.
If you can't connect content investment to AI visibility to pipeline, you can't defend the budget when the CFO asks why you're still publishing 40 articles a month.
Score Your Brand
Count your "yes" answers honestly.
What Happens Next
The answer economy isn't coming. It's here. ChatGPT handles over 2.5 billion queries per day. Google's AI Overviews dominate the SERP. Perplexity processes over 60 million queries per day. These platforms are answering questions that used to drive traffic to your site.
Brands that score well on this scorecard aren't lucky. They're deliberate. They measure what matters, they build citation gravity, and they've made AI visibility a strategic priority, built on strong SEO foundations with the additional layers that AI requires.
The rest are slowly disappearing from the conversation.