Understanding your visibility score

What the visibility score measures

Your visibility score is the single most important metric in your Craawled dashboard. It answers a deceptively simple question: when AI platforms respond to queries relevant to your business, what percentage of those responses mention your brand?

The calculation is straightforward: visibility score = (number of crawl responses that mention your brand / total number of crawl responses) x 100. If you're tracking 10 queries across 5 platforms (50 total crawl responses per cycle) and your brand appears in 15 of them, your visibility score is 30%. This gives you a clean, comparable metric that normalizes across different numbers of queries and platforms.

A visibility score of 100% would mean every AI platform mentions your brand for every tracked query — unrealistic for most businesses. In practice, strong visibility scores tend to range from 20% to 60% depending on industry, brand maturity, and query specificity. A niche B2B software company tracking highly specific queries might see 50%+ visibility, while a consumer brand tracking broader queries might see 15-25% and still be performing well relative to competitors.

The six metrics on your dashboard

While the visibility score is the headline metric, your dashboard presents six key performance indicators that together paint a complete picture of your AI search presence.

Total Crawls shows the cumulative number of individual platform queries Craawled has executed for you. This is your sample size — the bigger it gets, the more statistically reliable your other metrics become. Brand Mentions is the raw count of how many crawl responses contained your brand name or domain citation. Visibility Rate is the percentage metric described above. Average Position indicates where your brand typically appears in AI responses — first mention, third mention, etc. Lower numbers are better. Average Sentiment scores how positively AI platforms frame your brand on a scale from -1 (negative) to +1 (positive). Competitor Mentions tracks how often competitors appear across your tracked queries.

Reading the visibility chart over time

Below the metric cards, the visibility chart plots your score over time. This is where the real insights live. A single snapshot tells you where you stand today; the trend line tells you whether your efforts are working.

The chart defaults to a 30-day view, but you can adjust the time range to see longer-term trends. Look for a few key patterns. A steadily rising line means your content and brand authority improvements are translating into more AI mentions — keep doing what you're doing. A flat line suggests you've plateaued and need to try new tactics. A declining line is a warning signal that often indicates competitors are gaining ground or that your content is becoming stale.

Expect some day-to-day variance. AI responses aren't deterministic — the same query can produce different results on different days, especially on platforms like Perplexity that rely heavily on real-time web search. Focus on the overall trend direction rather than individual data points.

What affects your score

Several factors influence whether AI platforms mention your brand in any given response. Understanding these helps you focus your optimization efforts on what actually moves the needle.

Content authority is the most significant factor. AI models are trained on — and retrieve from — the open web. If your brand appears frequently in authoritative, well-cited sources (not just your own website), models develop higher confidence in mentioning you. This includes press coverage, industry analyst reports, review sites, comparison articles, and community discussions on platforms like Reddit and Stack Overflow.

Brand recognition within the training data matters for platforms like ChatGPT and Claude that rely heavily on parametric knowledge. If your brand was well-established before the model's training cutoff, it has an inherent advantage. Newer brands need to focus more heavily on platforms that use real-time retrieval, like Perplexity.

Query relevance is often overlooked. Your visibility score is directly tied to which queries you're tracking. If you track queries that are highly relevant to your core offering, you'll see a more accurate (and likely higher) score than if you track overly broad queries where dozens of brands could legitimately be mentioned.

Benchmarking against competitors

Your visibility score becomes exponentially more valuable when compared against competitors. A 25% visibility rate might sound mediocre in isolation, but if your top competitor is at 18%, you're actually leading the category.

Craawled tracks competitor mentions across all your queries automatically once you add competitor brands. The share of voice metric shows each brand's proportion of total mentions, giving you a clear view of the competitive landscape. Pay special attention to queries where competitors are mentioned but you aren't — these represent the most actionable opportunities because they're queries where AI platforms have already demonstrated willingness to mention brands in your space.

The most strategic way to use competitive benchmarking is to identify patterns. Do competitors outperform you on a specific platform? That tells you where to focus your optimization. Do they get mentioned for certain query types but not others? That reveals gaps in your content strategy. The goal isn't just to track the numbers — it's to turn competitive intelligence into a concrete action plan.