AI assistants are increasingly where buyers begin their search. See whether AI can discover, verify, and recommend your business — versus your top competitor.
A plain-English explanation of every number, every section, and exactly how the score was calculated — using a fictional example so the math is clear.
The Visibility Read is a single number from 0 to 100 that estimates how visible your brand is when real buyers ask AI assistants about your category. It is a directional read generated in seconds from live AI responses — not the analyst-verified Waypoint Score™ that comes with the full Audit.
A score of 61 means: when someone asks Claude or ChatGPT about fast casual restaurants in Austin, Taco Tornado appears in roughly 6 out of 10 relevant AI responses — and when it does appear, it's usually mentioned positively and relatively early in the answer.
A score of 44 means: Burrito Rocket appears in fewer than half of relevant AI responses, and when it does appear, it's often mentioned with less confidence or later in the response than its competitor.
The Visibility Read is the average of three dimension scores: Discover, Verify, and Recommend, each equally weighted. The full Waypoint Audit scores these same three dimensions against measured evidence — your actual review volume, directory listings, and press coverage — rather than inferring them from AI responses.
When you run a Waypoint scan, here is exactly what happens:
Discover measures whether AI surfaces your brand when buyers search your category. AI engines cite brands whose content vocabulary mirrors the queries buyers type. If buyers ask "best breakfast tacos Austin" and your website talks about "artisanal morning cuisine," AI can't connect the two.
The 3 prompts used for this dimension are unbranded category searches — the kind a buyer types before they know which brand they want. Your score here tells you whether AI organically surfaces your brand when someone searches your category.
Verify measures how much independent third-party evidence AI engines have to back up a mention of your brand. AI engines don't just repeat your website — they weight external sources like review platforms, press coverage, directories, and industry publications far more heavily than anything you publish yourself.
The 3 prompts used here are brand-specific reputation queries — "is [brand] any good," "reviews for [brand]," "[brand] vs [competitor]." Your score here tells you whether AI can confidently vouch for you or has to qualify every mention.
Recommend measures whether your content is structured so AI engines can actually extract and cite it. AI engines don't browse — they extract. Content that is formatted as direct answers to specific questions gets cited. Content that requires navigation, interpretation, or reading between the lines gets ignored.
The 3 prompts here are direct information queries — "tell me about [brand]," "what makes [brand] different," "overview of [brand] and [competitor]." Your score here tells you whether AI can answer specific questions about you or has to say "I don't have enough information."
For every AI response, each brand gets a raw score calculated like this:
Using the Taco Tornado example above — mentioned first (3), positive context (3), no third-party bonus (0):
After scoring all 6 responses in a dimension:
After scoring, Waypoint identifies your single most impactful gap — the one dimension where improvement will move your score the most. It then gives you three specific actions to address it.
The diagnostic looks at your three dimension scores and finds the weakest one. That becomes your primary gap. The actions are sequenced by impact — the highest-ROI change first.
For Burrito Rocket, the weakest dimension is Verify (38). The primary gap diagnosis: "AI engines lack the third-party signals to recommend you with confidence." The first action: complete all directory profiles and request reviews — because one verified Yelp review carries more AI weight than any website update.
The baseline date stamps when the scan ran. Re-run in 30 days to measure improvement.
The free scan shows your score, dimension breakdown, and primary gap. The full Waypoint Audit Report goes deeper:
The audit is produced by Kevin McCarthy at Open Road Analytics — not generated automatically. Every report includes senior analyst judgment on what the data actually means for your specific business.
The Visibility Read is a directional estimate derived from live AI engine responses at the time of the scan and may vary on re-scan as AI model behavior evolves. The analyst-verified Waypoint Score™, delivered with the full Waypoint Audit, additionally measures review, directory, and press signals against a documented scoring rubric. The scoring algorithm — measuring citation detection, mention position, sentiment context, and third-party signal presence across multiple AI engines — is the intellectual property of Open Road Analytics.