For many organisations, especially those that are an important part of their communities, visibility has always been connected to understanding how people search for them and how they find information about the work they do. But the way people search is changing.
Increasingly, people are asking AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude questions that previously might have started with a Google search. This is also more visible across young people as they use AI more to find information and recommendations.
This does not necessarily mean that AI is replacing traditional search. In May 2026, Similarweb found that 95% of ChatGPT users also used Google. Instead, AI is becoming another layer in how people discover and understand organisations, services, and information.
Examples of questions that people can ask:
- Which organisation can support me if I am experiencing discrimination?
- Where can I find a particular type of support in my area?
- Which organisations can I volunteer with?
- Who is working on an issue that I care about?
- Which organisation provides the type of service I am looking for?
For organisations, this creates a new question: are you part of that answer?
Being part of the answer
For years, organisations have invested in understanding how they appear in traditional search. They have thought about SEO, keywords, search rankings, their websites, and the content people need in order to find them.
Those things are still important. But there is now another layer.
People are not always going through a list of search results and deciding which website to visit. Increasingly, they are asking a question and receiving an answer directly from an AI tool.
We can also see this shift happening within traditional search itself. Analysis of Similarweb data found that 68% of Google searches in the US ended without a click in the first four months of 2026. A separate 2026 field experiment found that when Google AI Overviews appeared, outbound organic clicks fell by 39.8%.
That means visibility can increasingly happen before somebody ever reaches an organisation's website.
That answer might mention your organisation. It might mention another organisation instead. It might cite your website, use information from another source, or give somebody information about your organisation that is incomplete or outdated.
This means that visibility is becoming about more than whether your website appears in search results. Organisations also need to understand how they are represented inside AI-generated answers.
From GEO/AEO strategy to monitoring visibility
Over the years, through our work with organisations, we have been helping organisations think about their GEO or AEO strategy and what it means to create content for a world where people increasingly find information through generative AI.
A big part of this work has been about audiences.
Who are the people you are trying to reach? What are they looking for? What questions are they asking? What prompts might they use when searching through an AI tool?
From there, organisations can think about whether they have content that actually responds to those questions and whether that content makes it clear to both people and AI systems what the organisation does, who it supports, where it works, and when it is relevant.
But creating the content is only one part of the work.
Once you have understood the questions your audience is asking and created content that responds to them, the next question is whether that work is actually having an impact.
Are AI tools finding that content? Are they citing it?
Is your organisation appearing in the answers you expect it to appear in? And when it does appear, is the information accurate?
Why monitoring matters
AI visibility is not something that organisations can check once and consider finished.
The way AI tools search for, interpret, and cite information continues to change. Different AI tools can also produce very different answers to the same question.
Research published by Stanford in 2026 demonstrates how significant those differences can be. In one study using the same set of news questions across several AI systems, BBC sources appeared in 28.5% of Grok 4 responses but only 0.2% of GPT-5 responses. The same information need can therefore produce very different sources and recommendations depending on the AI tool being used.
Your organisation might appear prominently in one tool but not another. A competitor or peer organisation might consistently appear for a particular question while you do not. An AI tool might cite your website today and use another source later.
Organisations therefore need a way to understand what is actually happening over time.
They need to be able to answer questions such as:
- How often does our organisation appear in AI search?
- Which AI engines mention us the most?
- Are AI tools linking to our website?
- Are they getting accurate information about us?
- Which organisations appear when we do not?
- What sources are AI tools using?
- Is our visibility improving over time?
So how are we solving this?
What can Visibly offer?
Visibly is an AI visibility monitoring platform that helps organisations understand how they appear in answers generated by different AI tools when their audiences are searching for information relevant to them.
The purpose is to move organisations from guessing how they appear across AI to actually being able to see it, without doing so much manual work. It would allow organisations to:
- monitor where they appear
- understand what AI tools are saying about them
- identify the sources being cited
- compare their visibility with peer organisations or competitors
- spot inaccurate information
- understand where there may be opportunities to improve
This is not about replacing the work organisations are already doing around their websites, content, audiences, SEO, or AEO. It is about adding the next layer: understanding how your content is answering your audience's questions across AI tools and making it possible for you to monitor and improve that visibility over time.
Be among the first to use Visibly
Visibly is currently in development, and we will soon be opening our pre-sale to organisations that want to be among the first to use the platform and help shape its future.
We are already seeing strong interest from organisations looking to better understand this emerging area and explore what greater visibility could mean for them.
Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to know when pre-sales open and how your organisation can join Visibly.