The Temso Methodology

What we measure

Rankings are derived from Temso's AI Visibility Index, which measures how brands, publishers, and social channels appear in answers returned by the AI search engines people actually use: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot Search, and Grok Search.

How we collect data

For each industry, category, and target country, Temso runs a fixed set of localized prompts every day for the full calendar month. Queries are issued through the real consumer-facing interface of each AI search engine, routed through residential proxies in the relevant country so that responses reflect what an actual user in that market would see, not an API surface or sanitized endpoint. The current rankings are computed from over 500,000 search results captured across the four engines during the period.

Signals we extract

Two signals are extracted from each captured response:

• Brand mentions, identified through entity matching against the response text and deduplicated per response.
• Cited sources, parsed from the URLs each engine returns as references and resolved against a curated domain registry that classifies every domain as a publisher (editorial) or a social channel (user-generated content).

Metrics

Two metrics are computed from those signals.

Visibility (for brands): the share of unique responses in a segment where the brand is mentioned, computed as the number of unique responses mentioning the brand divided by the total responses in the segment.

Presence (for publishers and social channels): the share of unique responses in a segment where the source is cited, computed as the number of unique responses citing the source divided by the total responses in the segment.

Segmentation and ranking

Brands are ranked within each industry, category, and country. Publishers and social channels are ranked at both the category and industry level, and an aggregated Global view is produced alongside the country-specific segments. Each row carries a change value equal to the absolute difference between the current month's score and the prior month's score in the same segment.

Cadence

Rankings are recomputed on the 1st of each month over the previous full calendar month and stored as immutable monthly snapshots, so movement between snapshots reflects true period-over-period shifts in AI visibility across the four search engines.

The publisher directory

The same curated domain registry that classifies cited sources also powers the publisher directory: a public, browsable record of the media outlets, review sites, blogs, and creator channels that AI search engines cite when they answer questions in each industry.

Inclusion, position, and badges are determined solely by observed citation activity. A publisher cannot buy a listing, a rank, or a badge, and being a Temso customer confers no advantage in the data.

Each profile carries the publisher's presence data, how it has moved over time, and any badges it has earned. Profiles are created and maintained by Temso from the ranking data whether or not the publisher takes part.

Verified profiles

A publisher can claim its profile and have ownership verified. Verification confirms that the person requesting control genuinely represents the domain; we check the request against the domain's own published contact records before granting access.

Verification changes what a publisher can publish on its profile:

• A press or media contact, shown publicly. On unverified profiles this stays hidden.
• Embeddable badges that link back to the profile, so they can be displayed on the publisher's own site.
• Editorial detail: positioning, coverage areas, and featured work.

Verification never changes the underlying measurement. Presence scores, rankings, and badges are computed identically for verified and unverified publishers, and a profile's data is not altered, promoted, or withheld on the basis of whether it has been claimed.

By claiming and verifying a profile, a publisher grants Temso the right to use its name and logo to identify it across the publisher directory, the rankings, badge pages, and Temso's own marketing and communications, and to announce that the publisher has verified its profile. Temso may make those announcements on its website, in its newsletters, and on its social channels. A publisher may withdraw this permission at any time by writing to legal@temso.ai; withdrawal does not remove the publisher from the directory or the rankings, which continue to reflect measured citation activity.