Measurements, not opinions, on how AI answer engines decide which brands to name. Everything here comes out of the same pipeline we run for customers: fixed prompt sets, nine engines, five runs a day, full answer text kept.
Where a post makes a claim about how an engine behaves, the source is linked. Where a number comes from our own data, the methodology is published alongside it.
RAG means the model fetches documents before answering. Visibility splits in two: whether the retriever finds you, and whether the generator names you.
Ranking and recommendation read different evidence. One page can win a query and contribute nothing to whether a company gets named in an answer.
Recommendation happens in two stages. Retrieval decides whether you are found, and generation decides whether you are named. Consistency beats prominence.
A free audit is credible if it holds three things constant: the prompt list, the runs per prompt, and the session state. Here is the method.
An AI citation passes no authority, expires with the next run, and can appear without a click. Every habit borrowed from link building breaks on it.
Being known but never shortlisted is an evidence problem, not a content problem. Engines source comparison answers from domains you do not own.
SEO competes for a position among ten results. AEO competes for inclusion in one answer. The technical work carries over; the scoreboard does not.
Three prompts in a clean session tell you whether an engine can describe you, will recommend you, or has you wrong. Five minutes, no tooling, no budget.
Twelve AI visibility tools compared on engine count, requery frequency and whether they explain absence, with every published price dated and linked.
Four causes make a brand invisible in AI answers, and each has a different fix. Here is the afternoon-long diagnostic that tells you which one you have.
Sixty AI search visibility terms defined with primary sources, led by the four that matter: citation rate, mention rate, share of voice, entity resolution.
Answer engine optimization is making a brand retrievable, accurate and recommendable inside AI answers, measured by citation rate rather than by rank.
