Methodology
How we measure share-of-AI-voice for the weekly State of AI Visibility leaderboard.
What we measure
For every brand in our tracked list, we run a fixed set of category-relevant queries against the four major AI search engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity — once per week. Each LLM response is parsed for brand citations (mentions and linked references). A brand's share-of-AI-voice is the percentage of category-level citations across all four LLMs that go to that brand.
Rank-in-category is the brand's position within its industry category for that week, sorted by share-of-AI-voice descending.
Categories
We track ten fixed industry categories. Adding or removing categories is a deliberate editorial decision — we re-bucket brands rather than letting the category list drift.
- AI Tools
- Higher Education
- Travel & Hospitality
- Insurance
- Legal Services
- Apparel & Fashion
- Healthcare
- Beauty & Wellness
- Local Services
- Real Estate & Home
Refresh cadence
Snapshots run every Sunday at 02:00 UTC. The results post to /state-of-aeo within the hour. Weeks are labelled by their starting Monday — so a snapshot run on Sunday, November 9 covers the week starting Monday, November 3.
Caveats and known limitations
- LLM responses are non-deterministic. We average across multiple queries per brand to reduce variance, but week-over-week swings can reflect model behavior rather than real-world visibility shifts.
- Smaller-share brands (under ~5% category share) have noisier signal — interpret rank changes cautiously when the share is in the long tail.
- The brand list is editorially curated. If your brand isn't tracked yet, contact us and we'll add it in the next refresh cycle.
Citing this dataset
We license the dataset under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You may reproduce charts and tables as long as you credit transformSEO and link back to /state-of-aeo.