LLM visibility is how often, and how well, AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot bring up your business when people ask about your field. It's also called AI visibility or AI brand visibility. It covers four things: whether you're mentioned, described correctly, recommended, and cited with a link.
Try this now. Open an AI assistant and ask it to recommend the best business like yours for someone in your customer's position. Did you appear? If you did, was the description right? That small test is the heart of LLM visibility, and most owners I speak to have never run it.
The four things LLM visibility covers
It's easy to treat visibility as one yes or no. It's really four separate questions, and a business can pass one and fail another.
| What it covers | What it means | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Mentioned | Your business name appears in an answer to a question about your field. | Ask five category questions a customer would ask. Note whether you appear. |
| Described correctly | The assistant says what you do, who you serve and what you offer, without errors. | Ask "What is [your business] and what does it do?" Compare the answer with your own facts. |
| Recommended | You're named as a good choice for a specific situation, not just listed. | Ask "What would you recommend for [a customer's situation]?" Note whether you're picked and why. |
| Cited with a link | The answer links to your website as a source. | Use an assistant that shows sources, such as Perplexity, or switch search on. Look for your site in the links. |
The order matters. Being mentioned is the first hurdle. Being described correctly protects you from losing a customer to a wrong detail. Being recommended is where the value is, because that's the moment an assistant sends someone your way. A link is the bonus that turns a recommendation into a visit.
A 20-minute manual check anyone can run
You don't need a tool for a first look. Use a notepad or a spreadsheet, and open ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot in separate tabs. Start a fresh chat in each one. Memory features can colour answers, so switch them off if you can.
Then ask each assistant these prompts, in this order:
- "What is [your business name]?" Record whether it knows you, and what it gets right and wrong.
- "Who are the best [your category] for [your type of customer]?" Record whether you appear and where in the list.
- "What would you recommend for [a specific situation your customer is in]?" Record whether you're picked.
- "Compare [your business] with [a competitor]." Record how fair and accurate the comparison is.
- "What do people say about [your business]?" Record anything that's wrong, thin or missing.
- "What are the alternatives to [a competitor]?" Record whether you're offered as one.
- A how-to question from your own area of expertise. Record whether your site is cited as a source.
- Look back at every answer and note which competitors keep turning up.
For each answer, record four things in a simple grid: mentioned, described correctly, recommended and linked, each as yes or no. Answers can vary from one run to the next, so run your most important prompts twice. When you want to repeat this each month, see how to track your AI visibility, and for software that automates it, the best AI visibility tools.
Why your visibility might be low
When I look at a business with low visibility, the cause is usually one of these:
- The assistant doesn't know you well, because little has been written about you outside your own website.
- Your site is vague. It doesn't say plainly what you do, who it's for and what makes you a sensible choice.
- Your pages are hard for crawlers to read, or your robots.txt file blocks them.
- Your details differ between your site, your profiles and your listings, so the sources disagree.
- Your competitors are covered more widely in the places assistants read, such as reviews, directories, press and forums.
- You don't answer the questions customers ask, so there's nothing for an assistant to quote.
None of these causes is mysterious, and most are fixable without a big budget or a rebuild. The fixes below are in the order I'd tackle them.
How to raise it
Say it plainly on your own site
Write short, direct pages that state what you offer and who it's for. Put the answer to a common question in the first lines of the page, then explain.
Get described elsewhere
Assistants lean on what several sources agree on. Industry sites, directories, press mentions and genuine reviews all help build that agreement. Aim for accurate, consistent descriptions, not volume.
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Make your pages easy to read and cite
Use clear headings, plain text rather than text locked inside images, and a robots.txt file that lets search crawlers in. Keep your facts the same everywhere. If a page answers a question well, a person and an assistant can both use it.
Check, fix and check again
Repeat the 20-minute check every month. If an assistant gets something wrong, find the source it's likely reading and correct it there. If you'd like a full version done for you, that's what my AI visibility audit covers.
Proof from my own site, not theory
I test this on my own website before I suggest it to anyone. Between January 2026 and September 2026, my monthly Google impressions grew from 209,381 to 831,210, and my average Google position improved from 27.2 to 16.5.
Visits from AI assistants rose from 32 a month to 3,599 over the same months. Visibility in search and visibility in AI assistants tend to move together, because the same clear, well-supported pages feed both. I've documented how I did it on my own site.
If you've run the check and the answers worry you, you don't have to fix it alone. I'm happy to look at the results with you. Here's how to work with me.
Frequently asked questions
Is LLM visibility the same as AI visibility?
In practice, yes. LLM stands for large language model, the technology behind assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. People use LLM visibility, AI visibility and AI brand visibility to mean the same thing: how often and how well AI assistants bring up your business.
What is AI brand visibility?
It's the same idea with the focus on your brand name. It asks whether AI assistants know your brand, describe it correctly, recommend it and link to your site when people ask about your field.
How long does it take to improve LLM visibility?
Some fixes, like making your pages clearer and correcting inconsistent details, can be done quickly. Being mentioned on other reputable sites takes longer. Nobody can promise a result, because assistants change how they answer.
Do I need a tool to measure LLM visibility?
Not to start. A notepad and 20 minutes with a handful of assistants will show you where you stand. Tools help when you want to repeat the check regularly across many prompts.
