What is AI Search visibility?

AI Search visibility shows how often and how prominently your brand is mentioned in AI generated answers. With Peekaboo, you can measure brand visibility in AI Search results, understand your presence in customer buying journeys, and take action to improve it.

How does Peekaboo calculate visibility scores?

Peekaboo calculates AI visibility using a position based score from 0 to 100. Higher scores mean your brand is mentioned more prominently in AI answers. Scores are aggregated across prompts and AI models, then benchmarked against competitors to give a clear visibility metric.

Why does AI Search visibility matter for my brand?

AI Search engines shape customer buying decisions by providing direct answers. Strong AI Search visibility ensures your brand appears at the top of answers, builds trust, and drives discovery. Without it, competitors capture visibility and you risk being invisible in a new search channel.

What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the latest evolution in digital strategy, extending SEO by ensuring brands appear in AI-generated answers through authority, content, and citations.

How can Peekaboo help agencies and brands?

Peekaboo helps agencies manage multiple clients with competitor benchmarks, white label reporting, and ROI proof. Brands use Peekaboo to track visibility in AI Search, ensure accurate answers, and uncover opportunities to grow awareness and outperform competitors in AI generated results.

Can I see which sources AI uses to generate answers?

Yes. Peekaboo's Source Analysis shows which domains, articles, and content AI engines cite when generating answers. This helps you identify high authority publications to target, discover PR opportunities, and fill content gaps so your brand is more likely to be used by AI systems.

How often is brand visibility analyzed?

Peekaboo tracks AI visibility daily by default so you always have fresh insights. You can adjust the analysis frequency, schedule batch reporting, or run on demand checks, giving both brands and agencies flexibility to track visibility in AI Search whenever needed.

How do prompts impact AI visibility analysis?

Prompts simulate the real questions customers ask in AI Search. Peekaboo tests discovery, purchase, and problem solving prompts to measure your visibility, track competitor mentions, and uncover which keywords and contexts drive AI generated brand recommendations.

What are AI citations and why do they matter?

AI citations are the sources that generative models rely on when recommending brands. With Peekaboo, you can see which sites influence answers, identify gaps where you are missing, and build authority so AI systems are more likely to include your brand.

How do I improve my AI visibility score?

You can improve AI visibility scores by publishing high quality content, earning authoritative citations, and optimizing prompts that reflect customer intent. Peekaboo identifies low scoring areas and shows exactly where to act so your brand gains more visibility in AI generated answers.

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AEO vs SEO

November 5, 2025

4 min read

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By Filipe Lins Duarte

AEO and SEO solve different problems. SEO gets clicks from results pages. AEO gets your brand named inside AI answers on AI engines. This guide breaks down the differences, shows how to optimize for AEO, and reviews tools like Peekaboo, Promptwatch, LLMRefs, and Profound.

AEO vs SEO

AEO means Answer Engine Optimization. SEO means Search Engine Optimization. SEO is about ranking on search pages. AEO is about showing up inside the answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot.

Is AEO the same as SEO?

No. They work together, but they solve different problems.

SEO earns you a spot on the results page. AEO gets your brand named inside the answer. That matters because people often stop at the summary now. In July 2025, ChatGPT drew roughly 5.7 billion visits, while Perplexity was around 140 million, so a huge share of research is happening inside answer engines, not just Google results pages.

Google’s own AI Overviews are already mainstream. Pew found that 58 percent of users saw at least one AI summary in March 2025, and those users clicked fewer organic links when the summary appeared. That is the shift in front of us.

From our experience, SEO drives sessions to your site. AEO gets your brand into the conversation before anyone clicks.

Which tools can track your brand visibility in AI engines?

Here are the ones we’ve tested that actually move the needle.

Peekaboo (aipeekaboo.com)

Peekaboo tracks where your brand appears inside AI answers and how your share of voice changes week by week. We use it to see which prompts trigger mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, then run a gap analysis to decide what to publish next. It’s fully white label on every plan, which is useful if you manage clients and want your own branding. Pricing starts at 50 dollars per month, so you can roll it out without a big ask. From our experience, the value is the loop it creates. See mentions, see sources, then get a short list of actions to raise your odds of being cited.

Screenshot of Peekaboo tracking AEO share of voice and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot.

Promptwatch

Promptwatch is good when you care about the prompt layer itself. It tracks how prompts perform across models and when your brand shows up. Teams use it to test phrasing, compare models, and monitor share of voice trends over time. Pricing has floated around the ninety to one hundred dollar mark for entry plans, with short trial offers that sometimes require a one dollar verification. It’s not an agency portal, but it is handy when you want to study the question side of AEO.

LLMRefs

LLMRefs focuses on citations. It shows which engines reference your site, which competitors get pulled in, and how often that changes. If you are trying to prove that your content is actually being used by models, not just indexed, this is the kind of visibility you want. The product positions around tracking citations and keyword rankings across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity.

Profound

Profound is built for larger teams. It measures brand visibility and share of voice across AI search tools, lists the citations behind the answers, and ties those mentions back to outcomes. If you need an enterprise stack with leaderboards, reporting, and integrations, this is the route.

How can I optimize my website for AEO?

Here’s the short version of what’s actually worked for us.

Write for answers, not just rankings. Open with a clean definition or direct claim, then support it. Gemini’s footprint is huge now, and concise explanations get reused.
Structure like a briefing. Headings that mirror likely questions. Short paragraphs. One idea per block.
Name the brand and entity clearly. Models pull entities, not just keywords. Make brand, product, and people pages unambiguous.
Show provenance. Link to primary sources and include dates. Copilot, Perplexity, and AI Overviews prefer content they can cite. Several independent reviews this year highlighted how citation behavior varies, so make it easy to reference you.
Measure share of voice inside AI answers. Track prompts, citations, and competitors. Adjust content based on what the models actually use, not what we hope they use.

Key Statistics about AEO and AI Search

Perplexity’s audience has scaled quickly, with estimates ranging from 22 million active users in early 2025 to 170 million monthly visits by late 2025, and a market share around 6 to 7 percent. It is not the size of ChatGPT, but it is not fringe either.
Google said AI Overviews reach more than 1.5 billion people monthly, and external analyses suggest Overviews appear on a large share of searches now. If your content is not AEO-friendly, you will miss those impressions.

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Filipe Lins Duarte

I'm Filipe, the CEO & Co-Founder of Peekaboo. I lead all commercial and customer facing functions here at the company. I am obsessed about making sure our customers are heard and have a great experience with us!