Guide Hub
Search visibility tools: start here
This is the index to the series, not a review. Three different questions bring people here, and each has its own guide: testing your own site right now, comparing the checkers before you buy, or understanding how a visibility score is calculated. Pick the one that matches what you came for.
Updated
Video transcript
Your rank tracker cannot see the thing that is now deciding your traffic. Rank tools measure position. But nobody ranks inside an AI answer. You are either named, or you are not. So the report says position three, and the buyer never sees you, because they never saw a list. The question changed. It is no longer where do I rank. It is am I named at all, by which engines, and against whom. Three numbers. None of them are in your rank tracker.
Search visibility used to mean one thing: where you rank in Google. It now spans two very different surfaces. Traditional rank trackers tell you your position in blue-link results. AI visibility checkers tell you whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews mention, cite or recommend your brand when someone asks a relevant question.
Most tools on the market still only measure the first surface. That blind spot matters: across 6,944 websites audited interactively by SearchScore (July 2026), 6.9% block at least one major AI crawler, a problem no Google-only rank tracker will ever surface. The guides in this series explain what each category of tool actually tracks, how the scores are calculated, and how to choose a tool that covers AI search rather than just Google.
Which guide do you need?
Three different questions bring people to this series. They have different answers, so pick the one that matches yours.
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“I want to check my own site now.” Go to search engine visibility checker, which walks through running a free 60 second audit of your own domain and reading the three scores it returns.
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“I want to compare the checkers before I pay for one.” Go to best search visibility checkers, compared, a shortlist of what each tool actually measures and where each one stops.
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“I want to know how a visibility score is calculated.” Go to google visibility score for how the number is derived and what moves it.
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“I only care about one AI engine.” There are per-engine walkthroughs for Perplexity, Gemini and Claude.
If you would rather just see your own numbers, run a free AI visibility check across every major AI engine.