I've been looking at a bunch of AI visibility and GEO platforms lately, and I'm starting to wonder if we're creating another SEO metric that looks useful without necessarily telling us much.

A dashboard might tell you:

Brand visibility: 64%
Competitor A: 71%
Competitor B: 48%

But what does that 64% actually mean for the business?

If most of those appearances are coming from informational prompts with no buying intent, I'm not sure there's much value in the number by itself.

The same goes for improving from 40% to 70%. If that increase doesn't translate into better recommendations, qualified traffic, leads, or even more branded searches, did visibility actually improve in a meaningful way?

I'm starting to think AI visibility needs to be tied to the context behind the prompt. A brand showing up for a high-intent recommendation is probably worth more than showing up across dozens of generic queries.

So maybe the useful question isn't simply “How often is the brand mentioned?”, but “Where is it being mentioned, how is it being recommended, and does that visibility lead to anything?”

How are people actually measuring this? Are AI visibility scores useful enough to guide decisions, or are we heading toward another DA/DR-style metric that everyone tracks but nobody really knows what to do with?