Brand appearances
How many of your tracked queries an AI engine names you in, and how that differs from citations.
A brand appearance is a tracked query where an AI engine named your brand in its answer. Your scan reports this as a count and a percentage: "12 of 15" means your brand showed up in twelve of your fifteen tracked queries. That percentage is the figure plotted on your Visibility over time chart.
Per engine
Each scan records appearances per engine, so you can see where you show up and where you do not. You might appear in most Perplexity answers but few on ChatGPT; the per-engine split tells you which engine to work on next.
Brand appearances vs citations
They are close, but not the same:
- A brand appearance answers "did I show up for this question at all?" It is counted once per query where you are named.
- A citation counts how many times you were cited across answers and engines, so a single query can produce more than one. See Citations vs sources cited.
Both are about you. Sources cited is the whole universe of source URLs across your responses, most of which are competitors and third parties.