Step 1: collecting the answers
- ChatGPT: collected with web search forced on, so the answer comes with the sources ChatGPT used.
- Perplexity: the answer and Perplexity’s cited sources.
- Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode: your prompt is run as a Google search, shortened to keyword form, and Visiby reads the AI answer and the pages it references.
- Claude: collected with web search turned on, and asked to answer as a user in your country.
Every run saves one record per prompt, per engine. Paid-plan runs can query the same prompt more than once per engine to reduce the noise of a single answer.
Step 2: detecting mentions
Visiby looks for your brand name, a short form of it, and the product names you entered during setup. It matches whole words only, case-insensitively, and ignores text inside links. Your tracked competitors are detected the same way, so every brand is measured by the same rule.
Step 3: classifying citations
Every cited URL is given one of three labels:
- Yours: the cited host is your domain or a real subdomain of it. A domain that merely contains your name does not count.
- Tracked competitor: the cited domain belongs to one of the competitors you track.
- Other source: everything else, such as review sites, forums, directories and publishers.
You can browse every cited page and domain in the Sources view, filtered by engine, topic, source type and ownership. See also how citation rate is defined.
Step 4: handling failed answers
Sometimes an engine returns an error or an empty answer. Visiby retries where it can. An answer that still fails is marked as failed or not run, and is excluded from both the top and the bottom of every rate, so an engine outage never shows up as a drop in your visibility.
Frequently asked questions
Is a citation the same as a mention in Visiby?
No. A mention means the answer text names your brand. A citation means the answer links to a page on your domain. Visiby counts them separately, so an answer that only links to your site is not a mention, and an answer that only names you is not a citation.
Does a domain that contains my brand name count as my citation?
No. Visiby only counts your exact domain and its real subdomains as yours. A different domain that happens to contain your brand name is labelled as another source.
Which country are answers collected for?
The country you chose during setup. It is applied to ChatGPT, Claude, and the Google searches behind AI Overviews and AI Mode. Perplexity answers are not location-targeted.
Does Visiby use AI to decide whether my brand was mentioned?
No. Mention detection is a deterministic whole-word match on your brand name and the product names you provided, applied the same way to every brand.