Three futuristic monolithic screens displaying GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT logos above a dense grid of famous brand logos in a dark charcoal and orange data center.
All Posts

Does AI Recommend Your Brand? Run the Free AEO Visibility Score

Ryan Turner
Ryan Turner · Head of Growth

Your buyers have stopped starting at Google. They open ChatGPT, type "best tool for X," and read the answer the model writes back. ChatGPT alone passed 800 million weekly users in 2025 (OpenAI, via Search Engine Land, 2025). So the question that decides your next quarter isn't "where do I rank?" It's simpler and scarier: when someone asks an AI about your category, does it name you, or your competitor? Most teams have no idea. We built a free tool so you can stop guessing.

Key Takeaways

  • Buyer research now starts inside AI assistants. ChatGPT passed 800M weekly users in 2025 (OpenAI).
  • Winning is hard to even see: two runs of the same question return an identical brand list less than once in 100 tries (SparkToro, 2026).
  • Your Google rankings don't carry over. Only 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews still rank in the top 10, down from 76% (Ahrefs, 2026).
  • The AEO Visibility Score measures your real standing in minutes, free, no signup. It runs on Massive's /ai endpoint.

What does the AEO Visibility Score actually do?

The AEO Visibility Score is a free, no-signup tool that asks ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot five real buyer questions about your category, then scores from 0 to 100 how often those engines name and cite you. You give it three things: your brand, what you sell, and your market. It does the rest in a couple of minutes.

Behind that simplicity is one rule we refused to break. The questions never mention your brand. If a question said "is Acme CRM any good," the engines would parrot "Acme" straight back and your score would be a fiction. Every question stays category-level ("best crm for small teams," "how much does a crm cost"), so the score measures whether the engines surface you on their own. That's the difference between a vanity check and a real measurement.

You get back a 0-to-100 score with a band: Invisible, Emerging, Competitive, or Dominant. Underneath it sits a question-by-question breakdown across all three engines, the third-party domains the AIs cited instead of you, an llms.txt readiness check, and a prioritized 30-day action plan. The number is computed in code from what the engines actually said, not graded by another model, so the number reads the same from one run to the next.

Why is AEO the battle you can't sit out?

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of getting your brand named and cited inside AI answers, the way SEO was about ranking links. It matters now because the clicks you used to win are disappearing into those answers. Pew Research tracked real browsing behavior and found that when Google shows an AI summary, only 8% of users click any traditional result, versus 15% when there's no summary, and just 1% click a link inside the summary itself (Pew Research Center, July 2025). The answer is the destination now. Being on page one underneath it barely matters.

And the answer box keeps spreading. Semrush watched AI Overview coverage climb from 6.5% of queries in January 2025 to a peak near 25% in July before settling under 16% in November (Semrush, via Search Engine Land, December 2025). Add ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot to Google's box, and more of your category's buying questions get answered before anyone visits a site. If you're not in those answers, you're not in the running. For the full case, read our breakdown of why AEO is the new SEO.

Why is winning AEO so hard?

Three things make AEO brutal, and all three are why you need to measure instead of assume.

First, your SEO doesn't transfer. Ahrefs analyzed 863,000 keywords and found only 38% of pages cited in Google's AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 for that query, down from 76% a year earlier (Ahrefs, via Search Engine Journal, March 2026). The model picks its sources by a logic of its own. Ranking first no longer buys you a seat in the answer.

Source: Ahrefs, 863k keywords, via Search Engine Journal (2026). The overlap between AI citations and top-10 Google rankings is collapsing.

Second, the answers won't hold still. SparkToro and Gumshoe ran the same brand-recommendation prompts dozens of times each across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google's AI. Two responses had under a 1-in-100 chance of returning the same set of brands, and about 1 in 1,000 for the same ordering (SparkToro, January 2026). SE Ranking saw the same instability from another angle: Google's AI Mode overlapped with itself only 9.2% across three same-day runs of one query (SE Ranking, June 2025). A single screenshot of ChatGPT naming you proves almost nothing.

What we learned building this: a one-off check is a snapshot, not a measurement. Because the answers shift on every run and across geographies, you have to ask many real questions, from a real location, and score the pattern. That's an infrastructure problem before it's a marketing one, which is exactly why the tool is built the way it is.

Third, you can't fix what you can't see. There's no dashboard inside ChatGPT showing how often it recommends you. Without running the queries yourself, from the country your buyers are actually in, you're flying blind. The AEO Visibility Score exists to turn that blind spot into a number and a to-do list.

Built on Massive's /ai endpoint

The whole tool runs on Massive's web-access infrastructure, with the /ai endpoint at the center. /ai asks real AI engines real questions from a real consumer device in the geography you choose, then hands back the completion and the sources the engine cited, plus the subqueries it fanned out to (Massive Web Render docs). That's the hard part of AEO measurement solved upstream: querying ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot as a local buyer would see them, and reading the citations back in a structured form.

Here's the part to flag for your engineering team. The same /ai endpoint that powers this tool is available as an API. Want to track visibility across more questions, engines, and markets than a five-question check, or build AEO monitoring into your own product? Your developers build on the same device-access network plus rendering stack: real consumer devices in 195+ countries, completions returned with their sources. It's the infrastructure layer, meant to sit under your AEO stack, not replace it. Explore the Web Render API.

Conclusion

The shift is already in the data: buyers research inside AI assistants, the clicks are moving into the answers, and the answers don't reward your old rankings or hold still long enough to screenshot. You can keep guessing whether ChatGPT recommends you, or you can get a number. The AEO Visibility Score gives you that number in a couple of minutes, free. Run it, see where you stand, then hand the /ai endpoint to your developers when you're ready to track it for real.

Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the AEO Visibility Score really free?

Yes. No signup, no credit card, no sales call. You can run a full audit (five questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot) and read the complete report on screen. There's a soft daily cap to keep the engines responsive, and you can email yourself the shareable report link if you want to keep it.

How is the 0-to-100 score calculated?

In code, not by a model. Each question is worth 20 points, earned across its three engine answers, and an answer scores if the engine either names your brand or cites your domain. Add it up for a 100-point base, with a small bonus for a readable llms.txt. Because it's deterministic, the same inputs produce the same number, run after run.

Does it work outside the United States?

Yes. You pick the market, and the questions get fired from a real device in that country. This matters because AI answers change by geography: Pew's behavioral data showed AI summaries already reshape clicks for US users (Pew, 2025), and the brands an engine recommends in one country often differ from another.

Can my engineers build on the same technology?

That's the idea. The tool sits on Massive's /ai endpoint, which any team can call as an API to query AI engines by geography and get completions back with their cited sources. If you want continuous AEO tracking instead of a point-in-time check, the Web Render API is where you start.