“LLM visibility” isn’t real — at least not in the way it’s currently being marketed. What the tools are actually measuring is brand relevance: whether an AI model considers you a credible answer for specific types of queries.
I’ve seen plenty of dashboards claiming to track LLM visibility, from Ahrefs to Writesonic and beyond. They promise insights into how often your brand shows up in generative AI answers. But let’s be clear: LLMs don’t share impression data, user prompts, or query logs. What these tools do is fire off prompts in bulk and then check if your brand gets mentioned. That’s not visibility. It’s a proxy for relevance — and reframing it this way is crucial if we want to make these insights meaningful for SEO and brand strategy.
Andthat distinction matters — because without that data, what we’re looking at isn’t visibility at all. It’s something else.
Why “Visibility” Is the Wrong Word
When we talk about visibility in SEO, we think about impressions, rankings, and share of SERP. Google Search Console tells us how many times a page was surfaced. That’s visibility.
LLMs don’t work like that.
- No impression data exists. ChatGPT doesn’t tell us how many people asked about “best payroll software for law firms” last month. There’s no equivalent to Search Console or keyword volume.
- All we have is sampling. Current tools bombard models with prompts, then average the entities that show up. That’s not visibility. It’s statistical guesswork.
So when I see “LLM visibility dashboards,” I don’t read visibility. What I see is a relevance checker.
What “relevance” Is The Better Frame?
The way I explain it to clients is simple:
- If an AI answer includes your brand, the model considered you relevant for that query.
- If it doesn’t, you weren’t deemed relevant enough compared to competitors.
That’s it.
Framed this way, the output becomes actionable. Instead of chasing a fake “impression” number, you start asking:
- Am I relevant for the questions that matter to my customers?
- If not, what would make me relevant?
- When I am mentioned, am I being positioned fairly against competitors?
This is also the foundation of what we’re building at InvuAI. We’re not pretending to give you “visibility” data. We’re giving you a way to stress-test your brand’s relevance across the exact personas and queries you care about — and to spot where you’re being skipped.
What These Tools Actually Tell You
To be clear, I’m not dismissing the tools outright. They are useful — as long as you understand what they are (and are not) measuring.
Here’s what I take from them:
- Gap signals. If your brand never shows up for queries where you should be relevant, that’s a red flag
- Authority checks. If your competitors get mentioned consistently and you don’t, you’ve likely got an authority or entity recognition problem.
- Messaging fixes. If you’re showing up but being misrepresented, that’s a cue to clarify positioning in your content and PR.
This is where the “relevance” framing helps. You stop chasing a phantom “visibility score” and instead focus on closing the gaps that matter.
Why SEO Fundamentals Still Matter
The irony is that all of this still comes back to the basics:
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- Depth and readability. Studies show long-form, comprehensive content is more likely to be cited by LLMs.
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- Entity signals. If your brand doesn’t exist in Wikipedia, Wikidata, or authoritative sources, you’re at a disadvantage.
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- Popularity. Strong brand search demand correlates with higher AI mentions. In other words, brand building still counts.
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If you’re already strong in SEO, you’re 70% of the way there. The remaining 30% is about making your authority explicit to LLMs: aligning your entity footprint, producing content that covers the right concepts, and ensuring your brand narrative is unambiguous.
Where I Stand
So here’s my take:
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- LLM “visibility” dashboards don’t measure visibility — because LLMs don’t expose that data.
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- What they actually measure is brand relevance to certain types of prompts.
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- That’s still valuable, but it needs to be framed honestly.
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The opportunity here isn’t to treat LLMs like another search engine. It’s to understand how they decide which brands are relevant — and then take deliberate steps to make sure you’re one of them.
At the end of the day, that’s what matters: when someone asks an AI a question in your space, are you a natural part of the answer?
