The AI Visibility Framework answers one question: when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overviews who to hire, does your business show up?
That’s the only question this framework answers. It’s a diagnostic instrument: eight scored factors, one hundred points, and a pass/fail gate that comes before anything else.
Why Ranking on Google Isn’t Enough Anymore
The overlap between top Google results and AI-cited sources has fallen from roughly 70% to under 20%. Ranking well no longer means being cited. Meanwhile, about 82% of AI citations come from third-party sources rather than your own website, and pages that go stale lose citations at roughly three times the normal rate.
SEO and AI visibility have split into two different disciplines. Most businesses are still only doing one of them.
First, the Gate: Can AI Even Read Your Site?
Before a single point is scored, I check whether AI engines can physically access your website. Cloudflare now blocks AI bots by default, and many sites quietly disallow GPTBot, PerplexityBot, or ClaudeBot without anyone realizing it.
If AI crawlers are blocked, the audit stops there. It doesn’t matter how good your content is — nothing downstream counts until the door is open. This is the most common failure I find, and the fastest to fix.
The Eight Factors in the AI Visibility Framework
Each factor is weighted by how much it actually influences whether AI recommends you — not by tradition.
Content Depth & Fan-Out Coverage — 15 points
AI splits one buyer question into several sub-queries. Depth and topical coverage decide whether you’re part of the answer.
Schema Markup (Stacked) — 15 points
The structured data that makes your site machine-readable. The bar has moved from “has schema” to properly stacked markup.
Earned Media & Citations — 15 points
Third-party sources drive the large majority of AI citations. For most businesses, this is the highest-leverage factor in the model.
FAQ & Conversational Content — 15 points
Content shaped the way people actually ask questions — the raw material AI assembles answers from.
NAP Consistency — 10 points
Your name, address, and phone, identical everywhere. Inconsistency fractures the entity signal AI uses to trust you.
Review Signals — 10 points
Volume, recency, and responsiveness — visible trust inputs in AI recommendations.
Author & Entity Clarity — 10 points
Whether AI can resolve exactly who you are and what you’re authoritative on.
Freshness & Maintenance — 10 points
Recency is now scored. Content decay is a measurable liability, not a housekeeping item.
What Your Score Means
85–100 · Ignited — AI-ready. The work shifts to defending your position.
65–84 · Warming — A solid foundation with specific, fixable gaps.
40–64 · Flickering — Visible to AI only in fragments.
0–39 · Dark — Effectively invisible at the moment buyers are deciding.
Gate Fail · Blocked — AI can’t read your site at all.
Find Out Where You Stand
Most businesses have never been measured against any of this — which means most have no idea whether they’re Ignited or Dark. The scorecard takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.