New Research Shows Why AI Visibility Is More Complicated Than Rankings
As more consumers turn to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI to research products, services and businesses, marketers are understandably paying closer attention to AI visibility.
But new research from SparkToro suggests marketers should be careful about how they measure that visibility.
AI Recommendations Can Change… A Lot
SparkToro recently studied how consistently popular AI platforms recommend brands and products. The researchers had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI nearly 3,000 times.
The results showed substantial variation.
According to the study, AI platforms rarely produced the exact same list of recommendations twice. The brands included could change, their order could change and even the number of recommendations provided could vary from one response to the next.
In fact, the researchers found there was less than a 1-in-100 chance that ChatGPT or Google’s AI would provide the same list of brands in two responses when a prompt was repeatedly tested.
That has an important implication for marketers: a brand’s position in a single AI response should not be treated like a traditional Google search ranking.
AI Visibility Still Matters, But How We Measure It Matters Too
The research doesn’t suggest marketers should ignore AI visibility.
Instead, it points toward a more useful measurement: how frequently a brand appears across a large number of relevant AI responses.
When researchers ran prompts repeatedly, certain brands appeared much more consistently than others. That suggests tracking overall visibility across dozens or hundreds of responses may provide more meaningful information than asking an AI platform a question once and recording where a brand appears.
This distinction is increasingly important as businesses begin thinking about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and how their digital presence influences AI-generated answers.
The takeaway? AI is changing how people discover businesses, but measuring performance in this new environment requires more nuance than simply checking whether your company “ranks #1 in ChatGPT.”
For marketers and businesses investing in AI visibility, SparkToro’s full study is worth a read.
Read the full SparkToro study on AI brand visibility and recommendation consistency.
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