Just ran my first AI visibility audit using one of those monitoring tools and got a score of 34 out of 100.
I have literally no frame of reference for this. Is 34 terrible? Average? Acceptable?
What the report showed:
My questions:
I need to present this to leadership and don’t want to either panic unnecessarily or downplay a real problem.
Context is everything with visibility scores. Let me give you a framework.
General benchmarks (for most B2B industries):
| Score Range | Rating | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| 0-20 | Poor | AI rarely mentions you |
| 21-40 | Below Average | Occasional mentions, usually late position |
| 41-60 | Average | Regular mentions, mixed positions |
| 61-80 | Good | Frequent mentions, often early position |
| 81-100 | Excellent | Dominant visibility, first-position common |
But here’s the thing:
Your competitor having a 52 while you have a 34 is the more important data point. That 18-point gap means they’re capturing significantly more visibility than you.
What the score components tell you:
For leadership: “We have visibility, but we’re consistently outranked by our main competitor in AI responses. This is impacting brand discovery.”
This is incredibly helpful. The competitor comparison framing is way better than trying to explain what 34 means in isolation.
Is there data on what position improvements actually translate to in terms of business impact?
Yes - the position data is compelling.
From tracking client data:
So moving from position 3.7 to position 2 could more than double the number of users who look into your brand.
For leadership, frame it as: “Each position improvement represents approximately 2x more user consideration. We’re currently losing 3x the visibility to our competitor simply due to position.”
I’ve been tracking visibility scores for 40+ brands across different industries. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Industry benchmarks matter a lot:
Why the variance:
Industries with more online content and established players have higher averages. Financial services has lots of authoritative content. B2B services often has less.
Your 34 in context:
If you’re B2B services, 34 is slightly below average but not terrible. If you’re SaaS, you have more ground to make up.
What I’d focus on:
The 18-point gap to your competitor is the issue. I’d dig into WHY they’re scoring higher:
Am I Cited has a competitor analysis feature that breaks this down. Super useful for identifying specific gaps.
Let me share our journey with visibility scores.
Where we started: Score of 28, average position 4.2
6 months later: Score of 61, average position 2.1
What moved the needle:
Content restructuring (biggest impact)
Third-party coverage campaign
Entity optimization
The score improved in waves - content changes showed up in 4-6 weeks, third-party coverage took 2-3 months.
Don’t expect overnight changes. But 33 points of improvement in 6 months is definitely achievable.
I present visibility scores to my board quarterly now. Here’s how I frame it:
The executive summary:
“AI visibility score measures our brand’s presence in AI-generated answers where buyers increasingly make decisions. Like SEO rankings, this directly impacts discovery and consideration.”
The competitive frame:
“We score X, our main competitor scores Y. For every 100 potential buyers asking AI about solutions in our category, they see competitor first Z% of the time vs us W%.”
The trend focus:
Leadership cares about trajectory. Even if your score is low, showing month-over-month improvement demonstrates progress.
I track:
Pro tip:
Tie visibility to business metrics if possible. We found a correlation between visibility score increases and demo request growth. That made the business case obvious.
Am I Cited gives you the data for all of this in exportable formats. Makes quarterly reviews much easier.
Traditional SEO person learning AI visibility here. The score concept is similar to Domain Authority but measures something different.
How I explain it to SEO people:
You can have high DA and low visibility score (and vice versa).
The correlation I’ve found:
Brands with high DA tend to have a floor for visibility (usually 25+). But the ceiling depends on content structure and entity optimization.
We have clients with DA 70+ but visibility scores of 35 because their content isn’t AI-extractable. And clients with DA 35 and visibility scores of 55 because they’ve optimized specifically for AI.
The implication:
Your existing SEO authority is a foundation, but you need specific AI optimization to maximize visibility score. Don’t assume one leads to the other.
Small business perspective - we started with a visibility score of 12. Twelve!
Against competitors with scores of 40-50, I thought we were doomed. But here’s what we learned:
The niche advantage:
Broad queries are hard to win. But for specific, niche queries relevant to our specialty? We now score 65+.
What we did:
Our score breakdown now:
The lesson:
Don’t try to compete everywhere. Own your specific space first. The visibility score for YOUR most important queries matters more than the aggregate.
Running an agency focused on visibility optimization, here’s my framework for evaluating scores:
The Score Components:
Most tools calculate visibility score from:
What each component tells you:
For your 34:
Break down the components. Your 28% mention rate isn’t terrible, so frequency isn’t the main issue. Your 3.7 average position is dragging down the score.
My recommendation:
Focus on improving position for prompts where you’re already mentioned. That’s easier than trying to get mentioned for new prompts. Often it’s a content quality/structure issue, not a fundamental authority problem.
Something nobody’s mentioned yet: visibility score trends matter more than snapshots.
We had a crisis when our score dropped from 48 to 31 over two months. Investigation revealed:
The lesson:
Your current score of 34 is a baseline. Set up weekly monitoring and watch for:
I use Am I Cited’s alert feature - get notified when visibility drops significantly for tracked prompts. Caught our competitor’s content campaign early enough to respond.
For your leadership presentation:
Show the baseline AND commit to a tracking cadence. “We’ll report on visibility score monthly and track progress against competitor X.”
We built our entire content strategy around visibility scores from day one. Here’s our approach:
Target setting:
Instead of arbitrary goals, we set targets based on competitor parity + category leadership queries.
Resource allocation:
We budget content investment based on visibility gap analysis:
What we track weekly:
The tech stack:
Am I Cited for monitoring + Notion for content planning + custom dashboard for executive reporting.
Your 34 is a starting point, not a judgment. Build the tracking infrastructure now and focus on systematic improvement.
This community is amazing. Here’s my summary for leadership:
The framing:
“Our AI visibility score is 34 vs our main competitor’s 52. This means they’re significantly more likely to be discovered when buyers ask AI for recommendations in our category.”
The context:
The action plan:
The goal:
Close the gap to competitor within 6 months. Target: Score of 50+, average position of 2.5.
Thanks everyone. This thread gave me exactly what I needed for the presentation.
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