Source Visibility vs AI Visibility: What Do Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound and Otterly.ai Actually Measure?
AI visibility asks whether AI answers name your brand. Source visibility asks whether they cite your pages, or pages that mention you, as evidence. The two often diverge. A brand can be named often while AI cites other sites, or cited as a source without being recommended. All three tools measure both, in different ways. Otterly separates brand coverage from domain coverage for each prompt. Profound reports a visibility score beside citation share, and classifies every source as owned, competitor, earned media and so on. Ahrefs Brand Radar measures mentions, cited domains and cited pages across a very large prompt dataset. Knowing which number you are reading prevents the most common reporting mistakes.
What is the difference?
- AI visibility (brand visibility): your brand appears in the answer text. Measured as mentions, the share of prompts that mention you, share of voice against competitors, position and sentiment.
- Source visibility (citation visibility): your domain or pages appear in the answer's sources. Measured as citations, the share of prompts that cite your domain, and citation share.
- Earned source visibility: third-party pages that mention you are cited. Your brand benefits even though your own site is not the source.
Each answers a different question. Brand visibility shows whether AI puts you in front of buyers. Source visibility shows whether AI trusts your content, and whether readers can click through. Earned source visibility shows whether the wider web is making your case for you. Why they should be reported apart is covered in why measure brand mention rate separately from citation rate.
How does each tool measure them?
From each vendor's help documentation and product pages in 2026:
| Otterly.AI | Profound | Ahrefs Brand Radar | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prompt base | Your tracked prompts, daily | Your tracked prompts, daily on up to nine engines | A very large dataset of prompts modelled on search keywords, plus optional custom prompts |
| Brand visibility | Brand mentions, brand coverage (share of prompts that mention you), share of voice, average position, net sentiment score | Visibility score (share of responses mentioning you), share of voice, average position, sentiment | Mentions, AI share of voice, answers mentioning you or only competitors |
| Source visibility | Domain citations (count) and domain coverage (share of prompts citing your domain) | Citation coverage (share of responses citing your domain) and citation share (share of all citations), by platform, topic and prompt; watched pages | Cited domains and cited pages reports |
| Source types | Every cited URL with a domain category (brand, news/media, blogs, community/forum, social media) and whether the page mentions your brand | Every source classified: owned, competitor, earned media, press wire, social, institution | Cited domains and cited pages reports; filter answers by citations of your domain |
| Composite | None; the Brand Visibility Index is a chart of coverage against average position, not a single score | Visibility score and rankings | AI share of voice |
How does Otterly define its metrics?
Otterly publishes precise formulas. Each prompt, engine and day counts once for a brand mention, even if the brand appears twice. Brand coverage is the share of prompts that mention you. Domain coverage is the share of prompts that cite your domain. For Google's AI Overviews, prompts where no Overview appears are left out of both, so coverage is not diluted by searches with no AI answer. Share of voice is your mentions divided by all brands' mentions. Its net sentiment score runs from minus 100 to plus 100. This makes Otterly one of the easiest tools for reporting brand and source visibility side by side.
How does Profound frame sources?
Profound's distinctive step is letting you mark owned and competitor domains and filter citation share by source type. You mark owned and competitor domains; it labels the rest as earned media, press wire, social or institution. Citation share can then be filtered by type. That shows, for example, whether AI answers in your category rely mostly on news sites, review platforms or government sources, and where your earned coverage stands. It also lets you watch individual pages over time. More on Profound's methods is in Profound vs Ahrefs.
How does Ahrefs Brand Radar differ?
Brand Radar starts from scale rather than your own prompt list. It searches AI answers built from a very large set of prompts modelled on real search keywords, so you can see mentions and citations across a whole category without writing prompts first. Its cited domains and cited pages reports show which sites AI relies on for a topic, and filters can find answers that cite your domain but do not name you, or name only competitors. Ahrefs' own example makes the earned-source point: a handful of pages on a third-party site that mention a brand can appear as sources in over a thousand answers that also mention that brand. More is in the Ahrefs Brand Radar review.
How should you use the difference?
Plot each topic on two axes: brand visibility and source visibility.
- High brand, low source: AI names you but cites others. Work on your own pages so AI has something of yours to cite, and on the third-party pages it does cite.
- Low brand, high source: AI uses your content but recommends others. Make pages state plainly who you are and what you offer; check that comparison content includes you.
- Low on both: you are absent from the conversation. Start with third-party sources in the category.
- High on both: protect it; watch for competitor launches and outdated facts.
For earned sources, list the top cited third-party pages for each topic and check whether they mention you accurately.
Which should you report to leadership?
Report both, in plain words, with one example each month. A useful pair of headline lines:
- "We are named in X% of answers to our buyers' questions" (brand coverage or visibility score), with the change from last quarter.
- "Our site is cited in Y% of those answers" (Otterly's domain coverage or Profound's citation coverage; not citation share, which is your share of all citations), with the main third-party sources cited instead.
Add a short list of the top cited third-party pages and whether they describe you accurately. Leadership tends to understand "named" and "cited" quickly, and the gap between them explains why the next quarter's work splits between your own content and outreach. Keep the prompt set fixed so the lines are comparable over time.
What mistakes should you avoid?
- Adding mentions and citations together into one number.
- Comparing citation share with domain coverage across tools; one divides by all citations, the other by prompts.
- Ignoring earned sources, which often drive brand mentions more than your own site.
- Reading one day's data, since answers vary between runs.
We have not tested these tools side by side ourselves; this explanation is based on each vendor's published definitions and documentation.
What might this look like in practice?
Consider an illustrative project management tool, Druvstead. Otterly showed brand coverage of 45% but domain coverage of only 8% for "best tool for agencies" prompts. Profound's source classification revealed that most citations for those prompts were earned media: two review sites and an industry newsletter. Brand Radar's cited pages report found the newsletter's comparison article cited in hundreds of answers, and it described Druvstead's pricing incorrectly. Druvstead asked for a correction and published its own agency guide. Over two months, domain coverage rose to 15% while brand coverage held steady.
What do people ask about source and AI visibility?
What is source visibility?
How often AI answers cite your domain or pages, or third-party pages that mention you, as sources.
Why is my brand mentioned but not cited?
AI may know your brand from other sites but cite those sites instead of yours. Check which pages it cites.
Which tool classifies source types?
Profound and Otterly both do. Profound labels sources as owned, competitor, earned media, press wire, social or institution; Otterly tags each cited domain by category (brand, news/media, blogs, community/forum, social media) and shows whether the cited page mentions you.
Does Otterly separate mentions from citations?
Yes. It reports brand coverage and domain coverage as separate percentages.
Published by The Kovmere Team · updated Sep 29, 2026 · More resources