Methodology
How the visibility score is calculated.
Your visibility score is a weighted average across the seven AI engines Discoverable measures. The weights come from each engine's published reach, dampened so no single platform swamps the score, and every change to how we measure is dated and published below.
What one check does
A check runs your buyer-style prompts through each engine, brand-blind: the engine never sees which brand we are measuring while it answers. Each answer is recorded in full, along with whether your brand was named, how prominently, and which pages the answer actually cited. Naming and citation roll up into a 0 to 100 score per engine, and the per-engine scores combine into one overall score using the weights below.
Where an engine offers no public API (Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode), we read the public, logged-out answer surface itself. Every reading in your report is labelled with the surface it was collected from, because an API and a consumer app can answer the same question differently.
The engine weights
Weights are derived from published reach figures, not editorial taste. We take each engine's most recent published user figure, dampen it by square root so the largest platforms count more without drowning out the rest, and normalise the results to sum to 100.
| Engine | Weight | Published reach | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 28 | 2.5 billion monthly users | Sundar Pichai, Google I/O, May 2026Official figure |
| Gemini | 18 | 1 billion monthly users (app) | Google, August 2026Official figure |
| Google AI Mode | 18 | 1 billion monthly users | Google I/O, 2026Official figure |
| ChatGPT | 17 | 900 million weekly users | OpenAI, February 2026Official figure (weekly, so a floor for monthly) |
| Microsoft Copilot | 7 | ~145 million consumer users | Industry analyses, 2026. Microsoft's 420M figure counts every touchpoint and is not consumer-comparable.Estimate |
| Perplexity | 6 | ~100 million monthly users | CEO figure via Sacra, April 2026Company statement |
| Claude | 6 | ~100 million monthly users | Midpoint of third-party estimates; no official figure published.Estimate (lowest confidence input) |
When a run cannot measure an engine, the weights are re-balanced across the engines it did measure, and the report says which engines those were. We review the reach figures and this table quarterly, and any change to the weights is treated as a change of methodology: scores are never compared across it. The exact vector in force is stamped on every check as chatgpt:17,claude:6,copilot:7,gemini:18,google-ai-mode:18,google-ai-overview:28,perplexity:6.
What the score counts
Within each engine, every prompt contributes on a scale that rewards being recommended first and decays with rank: named first scores highest, named lower scores less, named without a ranking or cited without being named scores in the middle, absent scores zero. The per-engine score is the average across your prompts, and only sources the answer actually attributed count as citations. Sources an engine merely searched are shown in your report, labelled, but never scored.
Changes to how we measure
When the definition of the score changes, we do not splice the old and new numbers into one line. Every check is stamped with the methodology it was measured under, charts mark the break, and no change figure is shown across one. The dated history:
v5 · 31 August 2026 · all seven engines in one weighted score
The score now includes all seven engines we measure, weighted by each engine's published reach, where before it averaged four engines equally and reported the other three alongside. The change was made once, deliberately, and the weights and their sources are published on the methodology page. A score either side of this point is a different quantity rather than a better or worse one.
v4 · 9 August 2026 · collected from the consumer surface
Some engines are now read from the logged-out consumer surface rather than through their own API, which changes what a cited source IS on two of them. On Perplexity the API returned one list under two names, so what counted as cited was really everything it searched; the consumer surface distinguishes them and roughly a quarter as many sources now count. On Gemini the API returned redirect links that never named the destination page, and the consumer surface returns the real page, so the same source is a different row before and after. Points either side of this are different quantities rather than better or worse ones.
v3 · 8 August 2026 · cited, not retrieved
Sources and the score moved from everything the engine searched to what the answer actually attributed, and engines were given a higher search ceiling at the same time. Source lists shrink and the citation gap grows for definitional reasons, and the score is a different quantity either side of this point rather than a better or worse one.
v2 · 5 August 2026 · brand-blind answering
Engines stopped seeing the brand name while answering. Points before and after are different measurements.
The free check
The free, no-login check runs on Claude alone, so its number is a Claude snapshot rather than the weighted score, and it is labelled as one. Paid plans measure all seven engines in the same run.
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