> This page location: AI visibility > Overview
> Full Ranksmile documentation index: https://ranksmile.pl/docs/llms.txt

# AI visibility

Whether assistants name you when someone asks about your market, and whether they cite your site as the source.

When someone asks an assistant a question in your market, the answer names a handful of companies and links a handful of sources. AI visibility measures whether you are in either list.

## Mentions and citations are different

This is the distinction the whole module rests on.

Mention
: The engine names your brand in its answer

Citation
: The engine links your domain as a source for that answer

You can have either without the other, and the gap between them is usually the most useful number on the page.

**Mentioned but not cited** means the engine knows who you are but learned it somewhere else. Your reputation is doing the work and someone else's page is getting the traffic. This is the most common pattern and the most fixable.

**Cited but not mentioned** means your content is good enough to quote but your brand is not registering as an answer to the question. Often a sign that your pages answer the topic without positioning you as the option.

**Neither** is the honest starting point for most sites, and it is what the rest of the module exists to change.

## Which engines

Five: Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

The two Google surfaces are worth understanding separately from the rest. AI Overviews and AI Mode sit above the classic results, which means they change what a first-position ranking is worth: the answer is on screen, the user reads it, and the session ends without a click. The other three are the assistants people open instead of a search box at all.

Claude is not tracked yet. When it is, it appears in the engine list without you changing anything.

Growth tracks four engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Scale and Agency track all five, adding Google AI Mode. See [plans and limits](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/introduction/plans).

## How often it refreshes

Your plan sets the schedule, and every prompt follows it.

| Plan   | Prompts | Engines | Refresh |
| ------ | ------- | ------- | ------- |
| Growth | 25      | 4 of 5  | Weekly  |
| Scale  | 50      | All 5   | Daily   |
| Agency | 100     | All 5   | Daily   |

The prompt limit counts across all your Brand Spaces, and one Brand Space holds at most 50.

When you add or edit prompts, the new and changed ones are scanned right away. You don't have to wait for the next scheduled refresh to see where a new question stands.

**Reading a flat line:**

Generated answers are not deterministic. The same question, to the same engine, on the same day, can name different brands. One scan is a sample, not a measurement. Judge by the trend across several, and be suspicious of any conclusion drawn from a single run.

## The five views

**Inside AI visibility**

- [Overview: the trend, per engine and overall](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/overview)
- [Prompts: the questions you track and how to pick them](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/prompts)
- [Sources: which of your pages actually get cited](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/sources)
- [Competitors: who gets named when you do not](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/competitors)
- [Fanout queries: the follow-up questions an engine asks itself](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/fanout-queries)

Sources is the one to open first. It routinely shows that the page being cited is not the page you would have guessed, and that single fact changes where you spend your next month.

## When visibility is flat

Before concluding your content is the problem, check whether the engines can read you at all. [AI Search Health](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/site/ai-search-health) in the site audit tells you whether each answer engine's crawler can reach your pages. A blocked crawler cannot cite you no matter what you publish, and it is blocked by accident more often than you would expect.

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## Related docs (AI visibility)

- [Choosing prompts](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/prompts)
- [Sources](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/sources)
- [Competitors](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/competitors)
- [Fanout queries](https://ranksmile.pl/docs/ai-visibility/fanout-queries)