Digiday opened this morning with the sentence the search industry has been circling for weeks: “Marketers are catching on that AI doesn’t rank their brands, it decides whether it gets brought up at all.” The same piece reports that the Interactive Advertising Bureau has been assembling a framework to standardize how that visibility gets measured, because there is no agreed baseline yet. Companies are hiring heads of AI search, Digiday writes, “because the honest answer right now is that nobody quite knows how this works yet.”

That is the news in one line: a machine already sits between your customer and your name, and nobody has a reliable meter on it.

Early morning at a Tampa bus stop: a young man in an olive windbreaker jumps onto the bus step, one hand on the rail, dictating a question into his phone as the door closes.
On the bus step, his question goes to an assistant.

Google’s own report counts what it can

Google’s Search Console report for AI surfaces became available globally on August 31, Search Engine Journal notes, and it mainly shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. On Reddit, a user laid out what that means in practice: a link counts as an impression even if nobody scrolled to it, and every link inside an AI Overview is given the position of the Overview itself. Google’s John Mueller replied “This is pretty much it” and added that “Position for these is hard to do in a way that makes it useful.” Mueller then invited people in the thread to say what kind of position tracking would actually help.

Search Engine Journal headlined the thread as Google admitting the reporting is inadequate. What Mueller said is narrower, and more useful to you: the old “position 1 to 10” does not map onto today’s results page, and a better measure has not been built yet.

In a bike repair shop, the owner in a navy apron leans her weight on a tire lever and scrolls a laptop of unlabeled bars with a greasy knuckle.
The tire gives; the unlabeled bars on screen explain nothing.

The one number about calls is small, and it is from August

At SEJ Live (August 26), Sean McCrohan, CallRail’s VP of Technology, said AI citation clicks account for about 1 to 2 percent of calls for CallRail’s customers, a number that has roughly doubled since January. Search Engine Journal wrote the session up on Monday. The harder half of the point: people often start with an assistant and then run a branded search, so what can be measured looks like an ordinary search. In McCrohan’s account, two signals are measurable today — a click on a citation, and a customer who says an assistant recommended the business.

The scores for sale are samples

An Entrepreneur contributor who audits AI visibility for companies went further on Monday. “An AI visibility score is not a rank. It is a sample,” the contributor writes, citing a crowdsourced study in which 600 volunteers ran the same brand-recommendation prompts nearly 3,000 times, and the same list of brands appeared in fewer than one in a hundred repeated runs. The conclusion is the part a small business can use: the real buyer questions already sit in your own calls and messages.

Three things an owner can check this week

1. What Google’s assistant wrote down about you. Google’s Business Profile Help says Google “may occasionally reach out using automated messages via call, text, or WhatsApp to the verified phone number on your profile,” and that what you answer may be used to update the profile. Under Edit profile, the “Collected info” tab shows that information with its source and the date it was collected, and lets you delete it. According to Search Engine Land, Google announced on Monday that the tab is officially live; Google’s help page says it is available only in select regions, languages and business categories. One catch from the same page: deleting a collected detail does not change what is already on your profile, so read the profile too.

In the Tampa Pasta House kitchen, Margaret squeezes between two cooks at the stove, wiping her hand, and looks over her shoulder at a highlighted line on her phone, her finger over delete.
Between two cooks, Margaret checks what Google wrote down.

2. Where the caller heard about you. Ask, and write the answer down. A customer who says “an assistant told me” is one of the two signals McCrohan called measurable today. A month of your own tally is a number you can trust, because you know exactly how it was collected.

3. The words your customers actually use. Call transcripts capture the words customers use to describe their problems, McCrohan said, and those may not be the words on your website. If people ask about a “dripping faucet” and your profile only says “plumbing services,” the customer and the machine are reading two different businesses.

At the host stand at lunch, a guest shapes a small pasta with “little ears” in the air with both hands while Margaret leans in, laughing as she recognizes orecchiette.
“Little ears,” says the guest; Margaret laughs: orecchiette.

How we think about it

For a small business, AI visibility is not a score to buy. It is a short list of facts to check every week, and somebody to keep them true. That is work we build AI employees for, and it is the order we argue for: hire the AI employee first, then a person for what is left.

Sloane, our AI SMM Manager, posts from your own base — your products, services and offers, word for word — to the pages you have connected: Facebook, Instagram and Telegram. Piper, our AI Marketing Assistant, keeps one glossary, so everyone who speaks for you calls your things by the same words; she promises no reach, and the numbers she shows come from your own channels, for real dates — where a number is missing, she says so. Miles, our AI Business Advisor, reads your own recorded numbers once a week and brings you what changed and which part of it is yours to decide. He quotes no industry averages.

Top-down on a wooden table a month later: two jars tipped out into lines of pasta, the rigatoni line now longer but still shorter than the farfalle; Miles, the AI Business Advisor, turns a tablet toward Margaret as she adds the last rigatoni.
A month later, Miles and Margaret read her own count.

You do not learn a dashboard to run them: you describe your business in plain words, in the ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini app you already use. And before you hire anyone, you can watch our AI employees working in public on two demo storefronts, Tampa Pasta House and Casa Lista.

Nobody can measure yet whether a machine will say your name. You can check, this week, what it was told.

Sources

  1. Digiday — “In Graphic Detail: Inside the scramble to measure a brand’s AI visibility” · September 15, 2026 · Seb Joseph; AI decides whether a brand is brought up, the IAB framework, heads of AI search.
  2. Search Engine Land — “Google Business Profiles rolls out Collected Info” · September 14, 2026 · Barry Schwartz; Google’s announcement that the tab is officially live, quoted from Google’s post on X.
  3. Google Business Profile Help — “Edit your Business Profile” · undated help page, checked September 15, 2026 · Section “Review information collected by Google”: automated call, text or WhatsApp; source and date of collected info; delete; limited availability; deleting does not change the profile.
  4. Search Engine Journal — “How To Connect AI Search Visibility To Local Leads” · September 14, 2026 · Loren Baker; write-up of a session at SEJ Live (August 26, 2026): Sean McCrohan of CallRail — about 1 to 2 percent of calls, roughly doubled since January, two measurable signals, call transcripts.
  5. Search Engine Journal — “Google Admits Search Console Reporting For AI Search Is Inadequate” · September 13, 2026 · Roger Montti; the headline is SEJ’s; John Mueller’s reply on Reddit quoted in the body; report global since August 31.
  6. Entrepreneur — “The Most Valuable AI Search Data in Your Business Is Already Sitting in Your Sales Calls” · September 14, 2026 · Meghna Deshraj; contributor opinion; crowdsourced study of repeated prompts; first-party buyer questions.
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