Businesses have spent decades measuring their visibility across Google. Rankings, impressions, clicks and organic traffic became standard marketing metrics.
Artificial intelligence is creating an entirely new measurement challenge.
Customers are now researching companies through ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Google AI Overviews and other generative AI experiences.
The question for marketers is no longer simply, “Where do we rank?”
It is increasingly, “Does AI recommend us?”
SearchForecast’s AI Brand Visibility & Monitoring service helps organisations understand how their brands, products, services and competitors appear across AI-generated answers.
AI platforms can influence purchasing decisions long before a customer visits a website.
A customer might ask an AI assistant to recommend flooring retailers, compare software platforms, identify hotels, research financial products or find local businesses.
The brands appearing within those answers gain exposure during the research and consideration stages of the customer journey.
SearchForecast monitors strategically important prompts and questions to identify which brands appear and how competitors perform across the same conversational searches.
This creates an emerging metric: AI Share of Voice.
Being mentioned by AI and being recommended by AI are not necessarily the same thing.
SearchForecast analyses how AI platforms position your organisation within their responses. We examine whether the brand is mentioned, recommended, cited or included within comparisons.
We can also identify the attributes AI associates with the business and which competitors appear alongside it.
Over time, this creates valuable intelligence about how AI systems perceive your brand.
AI-generated answers are influenced by information distributed across the web.
SearchForecast investigates sources being referenced or cited when AI platforms answer commercially important questions. These may include corporate websites, publishers, reviews, directories, industry organisations, forums and other authoritative resources.
Understanding these sources helps businesses identify where additional content, digital PR, citations or authority-building activity may improve AI visibility.
SearchForecast has extensive experience measuring digital visibility across complex organisations and large networks. AI Brand Visibility & Monitoring extends that analytical approach into the new generation of search.
First National Real Estate has worked with SearchForecast since 2007 across a network of more than 300 offices. SearchForecast has advised on websites, content, local listings and search advertising while managing Google business listings across the network. The program increased brand presence and qualified leads from local Google visibility. Monitoring hundreds of individual locations provides a strong foundation for measuring how brands and locations are represented across emerging AI discovery platforms.
Choices Flooring operates more than 140 stores throughout Australia. SearchForecast has worked with the group on local webpages, website development, publishing systems and search optimisation. The engagement demonstrates the importance of measuring visibility not simply for a corporate brand, but across products, categories and individual locations.
Supercheap Auto provides another example of visibility measurement at scale. SearchForecast used competitor crawling and search intelligence to identify gaps across a website containing more than one million stock units. The resulting strategy contributed to a 122% increase in Top 100 organic keywords in 2021. AI monitoring extends this competitive intelligence model from measuring search rankings to measuring mentions, citations, recommendations and AI Share of Voice.
Monitoring AI answers can reveal information gaps that traditional keyword research may miss.
Customers communicate differently with AI assistants than with conventional search engines. Their questions tend to be longer, more conversational and more specific.
By analysing these questions and the resulting AI answers, SearchForecast can identify opportunities for webpages, FAQs, guides, comparison content, research and supporting information.
This creates a feedback loop where AI monitoring informs ongoing content and GEO strategy.
Generative AI platforms are evolving rapidly. Models change, retrieval systems improve and new search experiences continually emerge.
AI visibility therefore needs to be monitored rather than measured once.
SearchForecast helps organisations track changes in brand visibility, competitor visibility, citations, recommendations and AI Share of Voice over time.
Website rankings remain important, but they no longer tell the complete story.
Businesses increasingly need to understand their visibility across traditional search engines and generative AI platforms simultaneously.
SearchForecast combines SEO, Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization to provide organisations with a broader view of digital discovery.
Because in the age of AI search, the brands customers discover may increasingly be the brands AI chooses to mention.