Score Methodology Update — Engine Weight Recalibration

On May 2, 2026, we recalibrated how your AI Visibility Score weights each AI engine. The new weighting reflects what the score is actually measuring — your practice's presence across AI surfaces a dental patient might use — and corrects an outdated assumption that no longer matches how generative AI search has evolved over the past 12 months.

1. What changed

The overall AI Visibility Score combines visibility signals from four AI engines. Each engine gets a weight that determines how much it contributes to the final score. We changed those weights:

Per-engine sub-scores are unchanged — how often each engine mentions your practice, how accurate each engine's facts about you are, how prominently you appear in its answers, and whether your website is structured so AI engines can cite it. Only the overall weighting shifts.

2. Why we changed it

2.1 The score now measures presence, not clicks

The old weighting was anchored on ChatGPT's 77% share of AI-driven referral traffic. That number is real, but it answers a different question than the one the score is for. Your AI Visibility Score isn't about which engine drove a click — it's about whether your practice gets mentioned at all when a patient asks AI about local dentists. That's a presence question, and presence works differently across engines than referral clicks do.

About 80% of local searches now resolve on the search results page itself, without any click — the patient reads the answer, sees your rating, and calls you (or doesn't). A score weighted by clicks would systematically under-count visibility on engines that show patients answers without sending them off-site, which is exactly what AI Overviews and Gemini do. The new weighting puts presence at the center.

2.2 The market shifted

ChatGPT's share of the AI chatbot market dropped from about 87% to about 65% over the 12 months ending January 2026 (Similarweb / First Page Sage). It's still the leader and still the heaviest weight. But weighting it at 70% — the original level — implies ChatGPT is the only engine that meaningfully matters, which the data no longer supports.

At the same time, Google AI Overviews appear on roughly 88% of healthcare-related searches — the highest rate of any industry tracked — so a patient looking for a dentist very often sees an AI answer before clicking anything. For a dental practice, Google AI Overviews are a critical surface the old 10% weight under-represented. Gemini grew from about 5% to 21.5% chatbot market share over the same period, which justifies doubling its weight from 5% to 10%.

2.3 Perplexity carries citation transparency

Perplexity is the only engine where we can trace every mention back to the exact source it came from — its citations are spelled out, not hidden. That makes Perplexity our most measurement-trustworthy engine, which justifies a heavier weight than its raw market share would suggest. It also surfaces local healthcare listings prominently, which makes it especially relevant for dental visibility.

3. What you'll see in your score

• If your practice is mentioned mostly on ChatGPT and rarely on the other engines, you may see a meaningful score drop. This is the recalibration working as intended — the new score reflects that single-engine presence is a less reliable signal than presence across multiple engines.
• If your practice is mentioned across all four engines, you will see a modest score gain. The increased weight on Perplexity, AI Overviews, and Gemini compounds in your favor when you have presence on those engines.
• If you have Perplexity citation misattribution issues (your practice is cited but linked to a competitor on Zocdoc), the penalty now hits about 1.7× harder than before — Perplexity's weight rose from 15% to 25%, so it carries a larger share of the overall score. Use the corrections list on your dashboard to fix these — they're the highest-leverage Perplexity fixes you can make.
• Per-engine sub-scores (the per-engine cards on your overview page) are unchanged. Only the overall score changes.

4. What is NOT changing

• The factual-check pipeline. Your practice ground truth is compared against AI claims using the same set of 12 practice facts (name, address, phone, hours, insurance, and the like), the same extraction method, and the same deterministic comparison logic.
• The correction lifecycle. Detect, attribute, guide, notify, re-verify — same per-engine, per-data-source workflow.
• Re-verification. After you fix an error, we re-check each engine to confirm the fix went live — some refresh within days, others take a few weeks. Those timelines are unchanged.
• Historical scores. Audits run before May 2, 2026 keep their stored scores. The new weighting applies only to audits run on or after May 2.

5. When this might change again

The current weights are documented as the binding decision for at least the next 6 months. We'll re-open the question only if one of two specific triggers fires:

• Gemini chatbot market share crosses 30% (currently 21.5%). At 30%+ Gemini becomes a peer of ChatGPT for general use, and the Gemini weight needs to climb above 10%.
• We improve how we sample Google AI Overviews. Its answers vary more from one run to the next than the other engines' do, and that inconsistency is what currently caps its weight at 15%. Once we can measure AI Overviews as consistently as the other engines, its weight can defensibly move to 20-25%.

Either trigger would produce a new methodology page like this one. We won't silently re-weight scores — every methodology change ships with a customer-facing record.

6. Questions or concerns

If you're seeing a score change that doesn't match what we've described here, contact us at support@getseeniq.com with your practice ID and we'll walk through your specific audit with you. You can always work your score back to the per-engine sub-scores, each engine's mention rate, and the engine weights — there is no hidden adjustment.