Gumshoe Visibility Audits (formerly known as reports) generate many metrics (visibility percentages, mentions, rankings, and more). This article gives you an overview of what those metrics mean and how to interpret them.
Why do these metrics matter?
Together, the following stats give you a complete picture of how AI models perceive your brand:
- Percentages show your relative visibility.
- Counts show the scale of mentions.
- Rankings show how you stack up against competitors.
By scheduling Visibility Audits over time, you can observe how these numbers evolve due to model updates, competitor actions, or changes to your own content.
What are the core visibility metrics?
Brand visibility
- Overall brand visibility: The share of AI conversations where your brand is mentioned.
- Persona visibility: How often your brand shows up when answers are framed around a specific audience.
- Topic visibility: How often your brand appears in answers tied to a particular subject area.
- Model visibility: How different AI models treat your brand across their responses.
What do the Competitive Leaderboard stats show?
Mentions
The number of conversations where the brand was mentioned. A single conversation counts at most once, so if a brand is named multiple times in the same answer, it still counts as one.
Competitive Leaderboard visibility
The percentage of conversations where each brand appears, shown side by side. This lets you directly compare how often your brand comes up against competitors.
What do visibility heatmaps show?
Visibility heatmaps break your data down into four cross-sections:
- Persona × Competitor: How competitors are mentioned across your personas.
- Topic × Competitor: How competitors are mentioned across your topics.
- Model × Competitor: How competitors are mentioned across AI models.
- Persona × Topic: How your own brand performs across personas and topics.
Each cell shows three values: visibility percentage, mentions (conversations where the brand appeared), and answers (total conversations in that slice).
What do the Conversations Page stats show?
The Conversations Page shows visibility at the individual prompt level, letting you see exactly which conversations mentioned your brand and what each model said.
To see how often your brand is ranked #1 in AI responses, check the “% of Results Ranked #1” chart on the Trends page.
What do sources and citations show?
Some AI models (like ChatGPT, Google, and Claude) surface the websites they cite in their responses. Gumshoe tracks:
- Top sources: Which domains AI most often cites when mentioning your brand or competitors. High counts here reflect influence on how brands are represented.
- Citation type: Breaks citations down by category (media, blogs, e-commerce, government, and more) to highlight which kinds of sources drive awareness and where gaps exist.