AI Search Visibility Score: Turning Six Separate Checks Into One Diagnostic

By now you could have a dozen separate audits on the go: crawl access, indexing, rendering, definitions, entity consistency, citations. Each produces findings, and it's hard to see the overall picture. A combined score gives you a single view, a way to compare over time, and a rough guide to what to fix first.

Be clear about what it is. It's a diagnostic you build for yourself, not a metric any search engine uses. Its job is to organise your work.

The six components

Component	Question it answers	Covered in
Crawlability	Can search and AI crawlers reach and read your pages?	AI crawler access
Indexability	Are the pages you want actually in the index?	Indexability gap
Entity clarity	Is it clear who you are and what you offer?	Entity identity consistency
Extractability	Can a clean answer be lifted from your pages?	Answer extraction test
Authority	Do trusted outside sources back you up?	Third-party authority gap
AI visibility	Do AI answers actually mention and cite you?	AI share of voice

Step 1: define a measurement for each

Turn each component into something you can count. For example:

Component	Possible measurement
Crawlability	Percentage of key pages returning 200 to the main crawlers, with content visible in raw HTML
Indexability	Percentage of key pages that are indexed with the intended canonical
Entity clarity	Percentage of identity attributes that match across your site, schema and top profiles
Extractability	Percentage of test questions answered correctly and directly from the page
Authority	Number of relevant, accurate third-party sources compared with your top competitors
AI visibility	Mention and citation rate across your fixed prompt set

Each should end up on a 0 to 100 scale.

Step 2: choose the weights

Not all components are equal. If crawling or indexing fails, nothing else matters. A sensible approach is to treat the first two as gates and weight the rest:

Component	Example weight
Crawlability	Gate
Indexability	Gate
Entity clarity	20%
Extractability	30%
Authority	20%
AI visibility	30%

A gate works like a cap. If crawlability scores 40, the overall score can't exceed 40, however good the rest is. Write down your weights so you can explain them.

Step 3: calculate

Overall = lowest gate score, capped, applied to the weighted average of the others. For a quick version, calculate the weighted average, then take the lower of that and the gate scores.

Component	Score
Crawlability (gate)	90
Indexability (gate)	80
Entity clarity	60
Extractability	45
Authority	30
AI visibility	25

Weighted average: 0.2 x 60 + 0.3 x 45 + 0.2 x 30 + 0.3 x 25 = 12 + 13.5 + 6 + 7.5 = 39. Gates are above 39, so the final score is 39.

Step 4: read the breakdown, not just the total

The total is a headline. The components tell you what to do. In the example, the foundations are fine but content extractability and authority are weak, so the sensible next steps are rewriting key pages and earning third-party mentions.

Step 5: track it

Record each component and the total every quarter. Look at direction. A rising score alongside better citation rates is encouraging. A rising score with no change in visibility may mean your measurements are off, and it's worth rechecking them.

Be honest about the limits

• Some components rely on judgement, such as test questions and entity checks.
• AI visibility is noisy because answers vary.
• The weights are choices, not facts.
• A score can't tell you about product quality, price or demand.
• Don't compare your score with someone else's, since the models differ.

Common mistakes

• Treating the number as a goal instead of a guide.
• Changing the method between measurements and comparing the results.
• Optimising the easy components to raise the score while ignoring the weak ones.
• Reporting a score without the component breakdown.

Used sensibly, the score is a tidy summary of work you were already doing, and a prompt to look at the weakest part first.

Further reading: Google's page on AI features and your website and OpenAI's documentation on its crawlers are good places to check the details straight from the source.