---
title: "AI Visibility Report: Methodology"
description: "How the index is built: 20 buyer-intent questions, three AI assistants, three runs, and the Quality Score that ranks brand visibility."
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url: https://ai.mo.agency/ai-visibility-report-south-africa/methodology.md
last_converted: 2026-06-29T14:22:12.707Z
---

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AI Visibility Report

# Methodology

The South African AI Visibility Report measures what the leading AI assistants tell consumers when asked real buyer-intent questions. The method is the same across all 18 industries, so results are directly comparable.

## What we asked, and how

For each industry we wrote **20 buyer-intent questions** - the questions South Africans genuinely ask when choosing a provider - grouped into seven intents:

- **Ranking** ("what is the best X in South Africa?")

- **Ease** ("which is easiest to sign up / claim / switch?")

- **Comparison** ("Brand A vs Brand B")

- **Segment** ("best X for a student / family / business")

- **Criteria** ("cheapest", "best value", "most reliable")

- **Trust** ("most trusted / reputable")

- **Problem** ("I need X, who should I choose?")

Each question was put to **three AI assistants** - ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google) - with **live web search / grounding switched on**, so the answers reflect current, sourced information rather than stale training data. Every question was asked **three times per assistant** to smooth out run-to-run variation.

That is 20 questions x 3 assistants x 3 runs = **180 answers per industry**, and **3,240 answers across the index**. For every answer we captured the full response and every source the assistant cited.

## How brands are extracted

A second AI pass (Claude Haiku) reads each answer and extracts every brand named, where it ranks if the answer is an ordered list, and whether it is an active recommendation, a neutral mention, or a caveated one. Brand names and their variants (for example "VW" / "Volkswagen", or "FNB Private Wealth" / "FNB Private") are mapped to a single canonical brand so visibility is never split or missed.

## The AI Visibility Quality Score

Every brand gets a single score from 0 to 100. It rewards **being named, weighted by how prominently**:

- In each answer, a brand scores **1 ÷ its rank** when it appears in a ranked list (1st = 1.0, 2nd = 0.5, 3rd = 0.33, and so on, capped at 10th)

- A brand mentioned in passing, with no ranked position, scores just behind the last ranked item

- A brand absent from an answer scores 0

- The score is the **average across every answer, including the ones where the brand was absent**, multiplied by 100

So a brand recommended first in every single answer scores 100. A brand mentioned often but always near the bottom scores low. This is deliberate: it rewards genuine, prominent visibility rather than mere frequency. Recommendation strength (recommended vs neutrally listed vs caveated) is tracked as a separate measure, not folded into the score.

## Mentions, recommendations and citations

Alongside the Quality Score, each report shows:

- **Mention rate** - the share of answers that name the brand at all

- **Recommendation rate** - how often, of all answers, the brand is the active recommendation

- **Results across the three assistants** - because the models often disagree, "AI visibility" is really three different audiences

- **Sources cited** - the publisher domains the assistants drew on, counted by the number of answers that cited each (so a page cited several times in one answer counts once)

## Important notes

- These are AI model outputs at a point in time. They will shift as the models and the live web change. The index is a snapshot, designed to be re-run to track movement.

- This is a measure of **AI visibility**, not market share, revenue, or product quality. A brand can be excellent and under-visible, or modest and over-visible.

- Where one assistant occasionally returned an unusable response, that observation is noted; reported figures are built on complete answers.

*Prepared by MO Agency. Powered by Getmd.ai.*