AEO Score Explained: The Four-Factor Visibility Model

Your Brand AEO Score is a 0 to 100 measure of how visible your brand is inside AI answers. It is calculated from four weighted factors, each scored from real monitoring data across eight AI platforms.

The four factors, and how much each one counts

• Platform Diversity (37.5%) - how many distinct AI platforms surfaced your brand. It is a step scale: one platform scores 25, two score 50, three score 75, and four or more score 100.
• Query Breadth (25%) - how many of your monitored prompts returned your brand. A brand that appears for one question is less visible than one that appears across a whole topic.
• Citation Frequency (18.75%) - how often your brand is cited, with recent citations counting for more than older ones. Each engine decays at its own rate, so a citation in Perplexity ages faster than one in Claude.
• Trend Direction (18.75%) - whether your visibility is rising or fading, by comparing recent citations with older ones over a 30 day window.

What changed in 2026: Content Quality left the score

Until October 2026 the score had a fifth factor for Content Quality. It was removed because it never actually measured a brand. Its only input was a single cited page, and in the monitoring sweep it defaulted to zero, quietly dragging every score down by up to about 19 points. Page level content quality is still available, but as a separate on demand diagnostic rather than part of the brand score. If you have seen the AEO Score described as a five factor model, that was the older model.

How to improve your AEO Score

1. Widen platform coverage. Being cited on only one engine caps Platform Diversity at 25. Find where you are missing and fix the pages those engines prefer.
2. Cover more of the questions your buyers ask. Query Breadth rewards being present across a topic, not just for your brand name.
3. Earn fresh citations. Because citations decay, a steady flow beats one good month.
4. Watch the trend, not just the number. A falling trend on a high score is an early warning.

What the AEO Score is not

It is not the same as the free tools. The free Page check returns a citation readiness score, and the free Brand Mention check returns a brand visibility score. Neither is the AEO Score. The AEO Score is the paid dashboard metric, calculated from the four factors above across eight platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot.