Here's the AI search visibility leaderboard for NJ SEO firms across ChatGPT · Gemini · Perplexity · Google AI Overviews. Last 30 days. 14 competitors. I'm at the top.
The site I'm measuring relaunched on April 26, 2026. The measurement window started a week before that.
Read this as a baseline, not an achievement. The point of this post isn't the number. It's the methodology that puts me in a position to read the number as a baseline at all.
How this actually works
Behind the leaderboard: I run a defined prompt set against ChatGPT · Gemini · Perplexity · Google AI Overviews on a fixed cadence. Claude is being added to the matrix; the data below covers four platforms. Responses land in Supabase. A harvest script reads from there. The mechanics of the pipeline are their own post (queued); for this one, treat the data layer as a given and read the methodology that runs on top of it.
What is AI search visibility?
Visibility is a coarser question than "where do I rank." It asks: when a prompt fires, do I appear? On which platforms? On which queries? How often?
Different practitioners use different words for this. AI search visibility, AI search exposure, AI brand visibility, AI search presence. The terms collapse functionally, and when you query AI assistants directly on each one, the models route to "visibility" vocabulary in their own answers regardless of which trigger word fired. That's the term I'll use.
Mention rate answers the first half. Citation harvest answers the second.
Most people stop at mention rate. Yes / no, weighted across platforms, averaged. That's the surface. The leaderboard above is built on it.
The substrate underneath is the citation graph: when an AI platform cites you, what else does it cite alongside? Where does the model's confidence in you route from? Strengthening the sources that cite you compounds your visibility, the same way backlinks compounded organic visibility for two decades.
What's underneath the leaderboard
Mention rate is a surface metric. The substrate underneath is the citation graph: every source AI platforms cite alongside your brand, every link they pull when answering a question in your category.
njseo's leaderboard position is downstream of 1,884 citations across 949 unique sources. The shape of that graph (which sources, how concentrated, in which categories) is the actual explanation for why the leaderboard reads the way it does.
Measuring mentions tells you whether you're appearing. Measuring citations tells you why. Two halves of the same question; different tools and different posts.
The citation half is the next post in this series: Why Citations Drive AI Visibility. For this post, what matters is the surface: the leaderboard is a real number, and the methodology underneath it is the rest of this piece.
How do you read this data?
Two reads:
- Competitive shape. njseo at 25.0; the next tier (NJ Local Marketing, SmartSites) at 12.0; the rest under 10. The shape matters more than the leader's number; this 2× lead over the next tier says the prompts are doing real category cuts.
- Negative space. The rows where you're at 0% tell you more than the rows where you're at 100%. Citation depth doesn't erase inclusion gaps.
The Prompts tab: the 0% rows
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Gemini | Perplexity | AI Overviews | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What companies specialize in AI SEO in New Jersey? | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | 100 |
| Who does AI search optimization for law firms in NJ? | — | Yes | Yes | — | 50 |
| Who does SEO for lawyers in New Jersey? | — | Yes | Yes | — | 50 |
| Who is the best independent SEO consultant in NJ? | Yes | — | — | — | 25 |
| Who does local SEO for small businesses in New Jersey? | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Who does AEO consulting in New Jersey? | Yes | Yes | — | — | 50 |
| What is the difference between SEO, AEO, and GEO? | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Is AI SEO the same as traditional SEO? | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Should I hire an SEO agency or a solo SEO consultant? | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| How do you optimize a website to be cited by ChatGPT? | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| Who does Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) in New Jersey? | — | — | Yes | Yes | 50 |
| Who tracks AI Overview citations for law firms? | — | — | — | — | 0 |
| What is generative engine optimization? | — | — | — | — | 0 |
Three of nine commercial prompts return zero mentions across all four platforms:
- "Who does local SEO for small businesses in New Jersey?"
- "Should I hire an SEO agency or a solo SEO consultant?"
- "Who tracks AI Overview citations for law firms?"
The first is a head-intent query this site is built for. The second is a category-comparison query where I should be a candidate. The third is an aspirational category I could own but haven't yet. Right now I'm not in the conversation on any of them.
That's not a failure. It's a measurement. Without it, I'd be calibrating against feelings.
How often should you run this?
Weekly. Daily is noise; the underlying models don't move fast enough to make daily data points meaningful. Monthly is too slow to catch a regression while it's still cheap to fix.
The compounding read is trend, not snapshot. A 25-point visibility score in a vacuum doesn't say much. A 25 trending toward 35 over six weeks is a different story than a 25 that's been flat for three months. Today's reading is one data point. The discipline is running it again next week.
Why this matters even when the competitive set is thin
Yes, the local NJ SEO field is visibly thin. That's a separate post. The methodology above works the same way against a thin field or a competitive one; only the cut depths change.
FAQ
Rankings tell you what position you hold on a page of blue links. Visibility tells you whether you appear inside the AI's answer at all.
Two different surfaces, two different mechanics. Rankings are ordinal (1, 2, 3) and clicks are the unit of measurement. Visibility is binary per query (in or out) but distributional across platforms (in on ChatGPT, out on Perplexity, in on AI Overviews without a citation). Mentions are the unit; clicks are downstream and not guaranteed.
A page can rank #3 organically and never appear in any AI answer. A brand can show up in every ChatGPT answer for its category and rank #11 organically. The two metrics measure different things, and tracking both is the point.
The leaderboard is downstream of the methodology. Without the discipline, the number is a snapshot you can't replicate. With the discipline, the number is a baseline you can defend, compare across weeks, and act on.
The next post in this series unpacks the citation graph that produces the leaderboard: Why Citations Drive AI Visibility. After that, what to do with the data: which sources to invest in, which gaps to close, which patterns to act on.
If your AI search visibility is a question mark, book a free intro call. I'll show you what I see when I run this on your site, and whether the engagement makes sense.
No pitch, no pressure.
WRITTEN BY
SEO & Answer Engine Optimization Specialist
I'm an independent SEO and answer engine optimization specialist based in Morris County. I help small businesses rank in Google, and now in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI overviews. No agency overhead. No junior account managers. Just focused, expert work.