How Achtung.app measures AI visibility

Search-grounded measurement

Search-grounded means the AI model performs a live web search on every query and cites the sources it finds. Closed-book means the model answers from training data, whose cutoff is months or years old. Achtung.app only measures visibility in search-grounded mode.

Four reasons Achtung.app uses search-grounded over closed-book

1. It matches what users actually see. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity all default to live web search in their consumer products today. A closed-book API call measures the model's memory of training data, not what a real user would see when they ask the question. That would be a category error: brand recall instead of AI visibility.
2. Citations are auditable for the customer. A search-grounded response carries URLs. You click, verify, confirm: "Yes, our brand is on that page, that's the source the model cited." Closed-book gives no such audit trail; neither the customer nor Achtung.app could tell whether a mention was real or hallucinated.
3. Closed-book favors older brands. Training data has a cutoff. Brands that were prominent before that date dominate; newer or fast-growing brands are systematically under-weighted. Search-grounded ignores the cutoff and works against the current web index.
4. Reproducibility. Closed-book outputs shift with every model update; a fine-tune in November can change rankings without anything having moved in actual visibility. Search-grounded responses are anchored to live search results: variance is bounded by what is actually online.

Four providers run a live search of the open web on every query and return citations with URLs. Three run daily: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), and Perplexity. Claude (Anthropic) was added in May 2026 and runs weekly due to higher API cost; every Claude call forces a web search via the official tool. Methodologically Claude is fully comparable to the other three, just refreshed less often.

Blind measurement

Achtung.app asks AI assistants for recommendations in a niche without naming the brand or its domain in the query. Only when a model surfaces a brand on its own does it count as an organic citation.

This is intentionally stricter than tools that ask AI directly about a brand. A brand that only appears when prompted by name has no real AI visibility — it just exists in the model's vocabulary, which is different. Learn more about GEO →

Each keyword is queried multiple times. Achtung.app measures consistency, not single answers: a model that names you in one of ten attempts is not the same as one that names you all ten.

The AI visibility score

The daily score (0–100) is composed of six factors. The weighting may change as Achtung.app gathers more data – the factors themselves and their definitions are stable.

• ✓ Citation Frequency – share of queries that mention the brand at all.
• ✓ Citation Breadth – share of AI providers that mention the brand. Measures distribution rather than volume.
• ✓ Recommendation Strength – how actively a citation is framed as a recommendation, from neutral mention to explicit top pick.
• ✓ Position – where in the response the brand appears. Earlier mentions count more than later ones.
• ✓ Sentiment – tone of the mention (positive/neutral/negative).
• ✓ Trend Momentum – change in citation rate against the previous period.

Hallucination filter

AI models invent brands. Before competitor profiles are stored, Achtung.app runs them through two independent checks: does the domain exist, and is the website reachable?

Profiles that fail both checks are dropped. This catches obvious fakes but not all of them: domains that exist yet have nothing to do with the niche can still slip through. Achtung.app is working on it.

Search Console fusion

Brands can connect their Google Search Console to Achtung.app. Achtung.app reads clicks, impressions, CTR and position per query. The connection is optional and separate from tracking – a brand can be tracked fully without GSC.

Achtung.app uses GSC for one thing that does not work without it: detecting signals of generative search results displacing organic clicks. When Google produces its own AI-generated answer, classical visibility metrics no longer tell the full story.

GSC data never leaves the system. Achtung.app does not publish brand-specific GSC numbers, neither inside another team's brand portal nor in the public field notes.

Market signals: news and competitors

Achtung.app collects news daily via the Brave News API for the brand and its detected competitors. Brands in fast-moving verticals (tech, finance, sports, breaking news) can additionally enable an xAI search on X/Twitter, which surfaces verified posts mentioning the brand. Every X URL Achtung.app surfaces comes from xAI's search index, not from model output, so the citation chain is auditable end to end. Each item is then scored by an LLM for relevance and potential business impact before it surfaces as an alert.

The score is an approximation, not a verdict. An article with a high relevance score is one Achtung.app believes deserves attention – not a guaranteed business threat.

Alerts and thresholds

Achtung.app runs five detectors every day, each with its own minimum data window and cooldown so your inbox does not fill up with background noise. Every alert carries a severity: critical, warning, or info.

• ✓ AI Prominence: today's score deviates by at least 5 points from the 7-day average (10 points or more is critical).
• ✓ Provider drop: visibility on a single provider falls by at least 15 points vs that provider's own 7-day average (30 points or more is critical).
• ✓ Provider concentration: more than 60% of all citations come from one provider, which leaves you exposed to that provider's algorithm shifts.
• ✓ Competitor surge: an existing competitor gets cited more than 50% more often than its own 7-day average; or a new competitor shows up on at least three of the last seven days.
• ✓ Lost source: a third-party domain that appeared at least three times in the last 14 days (alongside your brand in half of those) has gone silent for three days.
• ✓ High-impact news: a news article about your brand today scores at least 75 for relevance and 70 for business impact (impact 85+ is treated as a warning).

The daily digest goes out once score calculation completes. Users pick per severity and per channel (email or push) what they want to see.

Vertical reports

For selected niches, Achtung.app publishes free vertical reports at /branche/{niche}, listed in the /branchen directory. The data is licensed under CC BY 4.0: brand names, rankings and aggregates may be reused with attribution.

Each report puts two sources of visibility side by side. On the AI side, the same three search-grounded providers as in the subscriber tracking (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) answer typical niche queries, each query run multiple times per provider. The web side comes from the classic Brave SERP for the same queries.

The ranking in a report is not a 0-100 score but a comparison within the niche: citation frequency, average position in the AI answer, SERP rank, plus an overlap comparison between the AI top 10 and the web top 10. SERP data is collected weekly, AI data once per report run. Browse all vertical reports

Free visibility scan

The public visibility scan at /en/ai-visibility-check asks two of the three search-grounded AI platforms (ChatGPT and Gemini) blindly for recommendations in the entered niche and delivers a result by email within minutes. It is intended as an entry point, not a replacement for ongoing monitoring.

The scan score is deliberately more conservative than the daily AI Prominence of a subscriber account. It averages only two of the six factors above: citation frequency and model breadth. Sentiment, position weighting, recommendation strength and trend momentum are not included. Reason: a one-off scan has neither historical baselines nor the query depth that would make those factors reliable.

The result is directional, not conclusive. It shows whether and in which models a brand appears in its niche. It does not replace ongoing monitoring and is not directly comparable to a brand's subscriber score. Run a scan

What Google itself recommends for AI optimization

Google has published an official guide for optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Four points stand out in the "GEO" or "AEO" conversation.

1. No special files. Files like llms.txt and AI-specific markup do nothing. The same crawl-and-index hygiene that makes a page findable in classic search makes it findable in AI answers.
2. No AI writing style, no content chunking. Rewriting content for machines or breaking it into tiny pieces is explicitly not recommended. Write for humans.
3. Schema.org is part of normal SEO hygiene, not an AI lever. Structured data qualifies pages for rich results and feeds the Knowledge Graph, but Google states it is neither a requirement for the AI features nor a direct factor for AI citations.
4. Manufactured brand mentions don't work. Purchased or seeded mentions produce no measurable AI effect and can violate Google's spam policies.

In practice: there is no technical shortcut to AI visibility. Appearing in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity requires real coverage in the sources those models search live on every query.

Google's guide covers Google's own AI features. ChatGPT and Perplexity use different infrastructure but the same basic pattern: live web search per query, then a cited answer. What improves findability in classic search results generally also improves the odds of being named in AI answers.

That is where Achtung.app comes in: not on the question of how to build that coverage, but on whether it actually lands in real AI answers, per provider, per keyword, daily.

Source: Google, AI features and your website.

What Achtung.app does not yet measure

This list is intentionally public. It changes when Achtung.app adds something — and it's the most honest answer to where the product stands today.

• ✓ Forecasting future visibility. Achtung.app observes trends; it does not predict them.
• ✓ Direct revenue attribution. Achtung.app does not automatically connect visibility to clicks, leads or revenue. It is on the roadmap.
• ✓ Recommendation workflows. Insights today are text, not trackable tasks.
• ✓ Complete hallucination detection. The filter catches obvious inventions but not all of them.