AI search has fundamentally changed how buyers discover brands. When someone asks ChatGPT "What is the best project management tool for a remote team?" or asks Perplexity "Which SaaS tools do SEO professionals recommend?", the brands that appear in those answers win the attention — and the click. The brands that don't are invisible, regardless of their Google rankings.
Notion Cue's AI Visibility Checker analyses your brand across six major LLMs — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, and Anthropic Claude — and returns a 0–100 AEO score, real query probe responses showing what each AI actually says about you, a side-by-side competitor benchmark, E-E-A-T signal scoring, and a prioritised fix list. It is completely free, with no sign-up required for the initial scan.
AI visibility measures how frequently and how prominently AI platforms mention your brand when users ask questions in your category. It is shaped by a different set of signals than traditional Google rankings — structured data coverage, E-E-A-T indicators, BLUF content structure, llms.txt configuration, and authority signals across the web.
The scale of the shift is significant. Semrush's 2026 AI search study found that the average AI search visitor converts at 4.4× the rate of a traditional organic visitor. Perplexity reported over 100 million weekly active users. ChatGPT's Search feature reached 1 billion queries per week in early 2026. For high-intent commercial queries — the kind that used to go straight to Google — a growing share is now answered entirely inside an AI interface, with the AI's chosen citations receiving all the click-through value.
For SEO professionals and brand marketers, this means Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is no longer optional. Understanding your AI visibility baseline — and tracking it over time — is as foundational as checking your Google Search Console data.
Enter any domain. The tool fetches your homepage content, checks for technical AEO signals (llms.txt, schema markup, robot.txt bot access, SSL, BLUF structure), then passes your domain context to a multi-LLM pipeline that simulates how each of the six major engines evaluates and cites brands in your category.
The scan returns five primary outputs:
Several major SEO platforms have launched AI visibility checkers in 2026. Here is how they compare on the features that matter most to SEO practitioners:
| Feature | Notion Cue | Ahrefs | Semrush | SEO Review Tools |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LLMs tracked | 6 (incl. Grok + Claude) | 5 | 4 | 3 |
| Query probe response text | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Competitor benchmark | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| E-E-A-T audit | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| llms.txt validation | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| BLUF score | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Schema generator | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Country / geo targeting | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Citation gap finder | ✓ | Paid only | Paid only | ✗ |
| Free tier | Fully free | Limited (top 5 only) | Limited | Credit-limited |
| Pricing (paid) | Free forever (beta) | $398–699/mo | $139+/mo | Free + credits |
| Total free tools | 14 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
The core difference: Ahrefs and Semrush are enterprise platforms adding AI visibility as a premium feature in a $400+/month suite. Notion Cue is built specifically for AEO — every tool in the platform exists to improve a specific signal that moves your AI visibility score.
Our research across 50,000 URLs found that 94% of pages cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini have at least one structured data type implemented. FAQPage schema is the most correlated single type — it gives LLMs a pre-parsed question-answer pair to extract and cite directly. Use our free schema markup generator to add JSON-LD to any page without touching your CMS.
llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at your domain root (yourdomain.com/llms.txt) that tells AI crawlers what your site covers, how to categorise it, and which pages to prioritise. It is the AI equivalent of sitemap.xml. Our llms.txt generator creates a correctly formatted file from your homepage in seconds, and our live validator checks your existing file against the full AI bot specification. Learn more in our complete llms.txt implementation guide.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — Google's quality framework — are also the signals LLMs use to evaluate whether a brand is safe to cite. Brands with documented case studies, named authors with verifiable credentials, consistent external references, and transparent business information consistently outperform anonymous or thin-content sites in AI citations. Run a free E-E-A-T audit to see exactly which pillar is costing you citations.
BLUF — Bottom Line Up Front — is a writing pattern where the most important information appears in the first sentence, not buried three paragraphs in. LLMs are trained to extract the most direct answer to a query; pages that answer the question immediately in their opening sentence are cited at 2–3× the rate of pages that bury the answer. Our BLUF Builder rewrites your page openings into citation-ready summaries and generates three angle variations for A/B testing.
If your robots.txt blocks GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or GoogleBot (which drives AI Overviews), AI engines cannot crawl your pages and will not cite them regardless of content quality. Check your robots.txt now and ensure AI crawlers are explicitly allowed — or use our robots.txt generator to create a correct configuration.
Slow pages are cited less. AI engines that crawl and index content in near real-time (especially Perplexity) de-prioritise pages with high TTFB and poor LCP scores. Our AI Page Speed Analyser translates your Core Web Vitals into an AEO impact score and shows the specific fixes ranked by expected citation lift.
The AI Visibility Checker shows you where you stand. These tools show you how to move the score — each one targets a specific signal in the AEO scoring model.
AI models do not return identical answers for the same query in every region. Perplexity and Gemini localise responses based on the user's detected location, surfacing regionally relevant brands over global ones. A brand that dominates AI citations in the United States may be invisible in UK, Indian or Australian AI responses.
The Notion Cue AI Visibility Checker includes a country selector — choose from Global, United States, United Kingdom, India, Australia, Germany, Singapore, UAE, and more — to understand your regional citation footprint. If you're running international SEO campaigns or targeting specific markets, checking AI visibility per region gives you a more accurate picture than a single global score.
For agencies managing multi-market clients, see our guide on international AEO strategy and how to prioritise markets based on AI traffic potential.
Scores above 70 indicate strong citation presence across most engines. Scores between 40–69 indicate moderate presence — you appear in some engines for some queries but have meaningful gaps. Scores below 40 indicate low visibility: either your brand is new, lacks structured data, or has technical barriers blocking AI crawlers. The score is benchmarked against comparable domains in your category, so context matters — a 55 in a highly competitive SaaS category may be stronger than it appears.
The Query Probes section shows the actual text an AI engine produces when a buyer asks a question in your category. Read these carefully. If you're cited, look at how you're described — is the language accurate, positive, and benefit-focused? If you're not cited, look at who is, and read how that competitor is described. That description tells you exactly what kind of content and signals led to their citation.
The competitor table shows you which brands are winning citations you're not getting, and the specific gap driving it. If a competitor has a higher score on E-E-A-T signals but a lower score on technical signals, your fastest win is fixing technical issues (llms.txt, schema, robots.txt) before attempting to match their content authority — technical fixes move faster.
Our research team publishes weekly deep-dives on AEO methodology, LLM citation behaviour, and structured data strategy. These are the most relevant posts for improving your AI visibility score: