The category
AI Search Intelligence
The discipline of measuring how AI systems find, understand and recommend a business — and why that is a different measurement problem from the one SEO reporting was built to solve.
AI Says audits your website — the foundation every AI platform draws on. To see what ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Google AI are saying about you today, our specialists review those platforms directly during a consultation. AI Says is independent and is not connected to any AI platform.
A different question, not a better answer
For twenty-five years, being findable online meant occupying a position in a list. The list was ranked, the ranking was measurable, and an entire industry grew up around moving documents up it. The measurement model followed the interface: keywords, positions, impressions, click-through rates. It worked because the interface was stable and the unit was unambiguous — a page either ranked third or it did not.
Generative answers break that model in a specific way. When somebody asks an assistant “who should I use for commercial solar in Brisbane?”, they do not receive ten links. They receive a paragraph that names two or three businesses, characterises each one, and possibly cites a few sources. There is no third place. There is inclusion or absence, and if you are included there is the separate question of what was said about you.
That is why AI Search Intelligence is not a rebadged SEO report with a new chart on the front. It is a different measurement object. SEO asks where do my pages rank. AI Search Intelligence asks what does the system believe about my business, and does that belief lead it to recommend me. The first is a position. The second is a claim — and claims can be incomplete, out of date or simply wrong in ways a ranking never could be.
You are the fourth result for this keyword.
A ranking says
Two firms come up most often for this. One specialises in commercial work.
An answer says
Were you one of them, and was the description of you true?
So we must ask
Where it differs
SEO reporting and AI Search Intelligence, side by side
Not a replacement. The two disciplines share inputs and diverge almost everywhere else.
| Dimension | SEO reporting | AI Search Intelligence |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of measurement | Position in a ranked list | Presence in a synthesised answer |
| Result shape | Ten links, stable between users | A paragraph naming two or three businesses |
| Query input | Keywords and search phrases | Conversational buyer questions |
| Reproducibility | High — the same query returns near-identical results | Variable by model, location, personalisation and time |
| What can go wrong | You rank too low | You are absent, or described incorrectly |
| Source of truth | An index of documents | A model plus retrieved sources plus citations |
| Correct output | A rank trend over time | A distribution across repeated observations |
| Primary lever | Relevance and link authority | Legibility, corroboration and answerability |
The practical consequence of row four is the one most businesses underestimate: because generative answers are not reproducible, any tool that reports a single AI “rank” without stating how many observations it is based on is over-claiming. AI Says reports no such rank: it measures readiness automatically and leaves the answer side to a specialist. See how the readiness score is built.
The measurement set
Four things worth measuring, in order
Everything else is a refinement of one of these — and only the last of them can be read off a website.
- 1
Presence
Across a defined library of buyer questions for your category and market, how often are you named at all? This has to be assessed against questions customers plausibly ask, not against your brand name — almost every business appears when you ask an assistant about it directly. It requires asking the platforms, so a specialist does it.
- 2
Accuracy
When you are described, is the description true, current and complete? Wrong service areas, outdated specialisations and invented capabilities are common, and they cost more than a missing mention because they actively misdirect a buyer. Also specialist work — you have to read what was said.
- 3
Competitive share
Of the businesses named in answers to your questions, what proportion are you? Absence only becomes a commercial argument when you can see who occupied the slot instead. Competitor websites are benchmarked automatically in the free audit; competitor AI visibility is researched by a specialist.
- 4
Retrievability
Is your own site legible enough to be the source? Structured data, crawl access, explicit service and location statements, question-shaped headings and answer-first writing all determine whether a system can quote you rather than paraphrase somebody else about you. This one is fully measurable today, and it is what the free AI Readiness audit scores.
How AI Says approaches it
Three commitments that shape the whole product
Readiness and visibility are never mixed
The automated audit measures readiness from websites and says so. What AI platforms actually say is human analysis and is labelled as such. The two are never averaged into one figure, because they are not the same kind of evidence. Being AI-ready doesn’t automatically make you AI-visible — but you can’t become visible without it.
Confidence is reported, not folded in
How much of your site could actually be read is shown separately from the score itself. A 62 where everything was testable and a 62 where a third of the checks could not run are different claims, and flattening them into one number would hide exactly the thing a decision-maker needs.
No number without evidence
Every audit result shows the raw signal behind it — the title we read, the schema types found, the URL count in your sitemap. If a check could not run, it is reported as not tested rather than counted as a failure.
The AI Readiness Score is a proprietary readiness assessment developed by AI Says, measured from your website. It is not an official ranking from any AI or search platform, and it does not measure what any AI platform currently says about your business. AI-generated answers vary by platform, model, location, personalisation, prompt wording and time.
Related disciplines
The vocabulary, untangled
Three acronyms circulate in this space and they are not interchangeable. Each has a page explaining it properly.
AEO
Answer Engine Optimisation
Making an individual page structurally capable of supplying an answer: schema, headings, question coverage, answer-first prose. Measurable today, and the basis of our readiness audit.
Read the pageGEO
Generative Engine Optimisation
Being retrieved and cited by generative systems. Broader than AEO, dependent on sources beyond your own site, and the area where the least is publicly known.
Read the pageMonitoring
AI brand monitoring
Watching all of the above change over time, because a single reading of a non-deterministic system is a snapshot rather than a state. Today, tracking over time is done with a specialist.
Read the page
The measurable part rolls up into an AI Readiness Score across 5 weighted categories. The rest is a conversation. Browse the resources, run a free check or talk to an expert.
Questions
Questions about the discipline
SEO measures your position in a ranked list of pages; AI Search Intelligence measures your inclusion in a synthesised answer. It asks whether you are named at all, how you are described, whether you are recommended and which sources the answer drew on. The unit of analysis shifts from a ranking to a statement — and statements have to be assessed for accuracy as well as presence. The two overlap heavily, because strong SEO foundations feed the retrieval step AI answers depend on.
AI answers are better measured as rates than ranks, because there is no stable list to rank within. Ask the same question twice and the wording, the businesses named and the citations can all differ. The meaningful measure is distributional: across a defined set of buyer questions, asked repeatedly, how often are you present, recommended, cited and correctly described?
Measure four things: retrievability, presence, accuracy and competitive share. Retrievability is whether your own site is legible and quotable enough to be a source; presence is whether you are named for the questions customers ask; accuracy is whether what is said about you is true; competitive share is who is named instead of you. Retrievability can be measured automatically and repeatably from your website, and the other three come from reviewing the platforms’ answers directly.
Retrievability and the whole readiness layer beneath it can be measured automatically: Technical Readiness, Entity & Brand Signals, Content Authority, Answer Readiness, Trust Signals. That is what the free AI Says audit does, on your website and on your competitors’ public websites. Presence, accuracy and competitive share on the platforms themselves are reviewed by a specialist in a consultation.
Every few weeks suits most businesses — often enough to separate signal from noise without chasing daily fluctuation. A first check establishes a baseline; the second tells you whether the first was typical. Model updates, new content and competitor activity all move the result, which is why a regular cadence beats a one-off reading.
AI search often matters more for smaller businesses than for large brands. A large brand is usually described adequately because so much has been written about it independently. A smaller business depends far more on its own site being legible, its identity being corroborated and its services being stated explicitly — exactly the signals this discipline measures and improves.
See how ready your business is for AI search
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