AI search is an important discovery channel for consumers, but measuring your visibility within AI platforms has been difficult until now. In traditional search, ranking data gives us a relatively clear indication of where businesses appear for specific search terms, but AI tools don’t provide a fixed position for every query. This makes it challenging to understand if your brand is being mentioned when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation or comparison.
To address this problem, Cloudflare has launched an AEO Visibility Dashboard as part of its Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) Suite, providing new insight into how AI assistants cite and mention brands. As Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer, Stephanie Cohen, said in the company’s announcement:
“Being discoverable used to mean ranking on a page. That’s not enough anymore. The agentic era is here, and the moments that matter, like when someone asks AI for a recommendation and gets an answer back, are happening at scale, invisibly, without brands knowing if they’re in the conversation at all.”
How AI Assistants are Citing, Mentioning, and Ranking Brands
Cloudflare’s new AEO dashboard has been developed to show marketers how AI assistants interact with their websites and brand. It provides insight into:
- Whether AI platforms are using a website as a source
- Whether they’re mentioning a brand without linking to it
- How prominently a brand appears in AI-generated responses
The dashboard complements Cloudflare’s existing Agent Readiness tool, which checks whether AI agents can access and understand a website. The new dashboard moves the focus of the company’s AEO suite from whether AI can access your content to what happens when it does. Many tools that measure AI visibility do so by sending test prompts to chatbots and analysing responses. While this can provide some useful data, it only captures a small sample of what’s taking place, and AI responses can vary significantly between searches.
Crawl Activity and Referral Data
Cloudflare’s dashboard operates at the network layer between AI platforms and the websites they crawl, allowing it to observe AI crawler and referral activity across millions of websites. This gives us a more detailed view of how AI assistants are interacting with content. The dashboard provides several metrics to give us insight into AI visibility:
- Citation rate – how often AI platforms pull from your site as a trusted source
- Mention rate – whether AI assistants name your brand even without citing your site
- Prominence – how much of an AI answer is attributed to your brand and where you appear within the response
- Share of voice – how you compare against competitors for relevant queries and whether your position is improving or declining over time.
These metrics are useful because they give us more insight to develop effective AI visibility strategies. A brand that gets mentioned by an AI but never cited has an authority issue. A brand that’s never mentioned at all has an awareness issue. Those need completely different fixes. Structured, well-organised content that search engines can rank is also the content AI systems trust enough to cite. If AI platforms consistently cite certain pages, it can indicate where your content provides useful information, as well as where the gaps are.
Discovery in the Agentic Era
As a GEO agency, we see this as an important move toward making AI visibility more measurable and accessible. Cloudflare’s dashboard provides strong evidence to help you identify whether your content is being used and how it compares with your competitors. Insight is only useful if it changes what you do next, though. In practice, brands with visibility into their AI presence can:
- Redirect content investment toward the topics and formats AI platforms are citing
- Strengthen structured data and site architecture so AI systems can read and trust your content
- Build the off-site authority (press mentions, expert commentary, original data) that AI models are pulling from
- Track whether your position is improving or slipping over time, the same way we would with search rankings.
The Final Word
AI search is changing how customers discover brands, and Cloudflare’s AEO Visibility Dashboard gives us a better way to understand what AI assistants are doing with your content and see how your brand measures up against competitors. If you’re exploring how to improve your AI visibility and measure your impact, our team would love to help you identify opportunities and provide you with an action plan. Contact us and let’s start a conversation.