Cloudflare has introduced the AEO Visibility Dashboard to its Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) Suite, providing website owners with insights into how AI assistants recommend their brands. Unlike tools that rely on test prompts, this dashboard uses network-layer data to track real crawl activity and referrals. This allows marketers to measure their ‘mention rate’ and ‘share of voice’ within AI-generated responses, helping them refine content strategies for the agentic era.
AI assistants have become a primary discovery channel for consumers, but brands have had no equivalent of a search ranking to show where they stand. When a customer asks an AI for a recommendation and gets a name back, there has been no signal to tell a brand whether it was recommended, briefly mentioned, or skipped entirely. Most tools attempt to fill that gap by only sending test prompts to AI chatbots and sampling the responses, a method limited in scale and prone to inconsistency if not paired with other data signals. Cloudflare’s position is different: because it operates at the network layer between AI platforms and the websites they access, observing actual crawl and referral activity directly, across millions of sites. The data creates deeper, more transparent insights than sampling test prompts alone so brands can make more informed decisions.
“Being discoverable used to mean ranking on a page. That’s not enough anymore. The agentic era is here, and the moments that matter, like when someone asks an AI for a recommendation and gets an answer back, are happening at scale, invisibly, without most brands knowing if they’re in the conversation at all,” said Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare. “Cloudflare sits at the network layer. We see actual signals: real crawl activity, real referrals, what AI systems are genuinely doing across millions of sites. That’s what powers these tools. Brands can finally get a real answer to the question they’ve been asking: how am I showing up, and where?”
Cloudflare built its AEO Suite on a foundational commitment: that site owners should have visibility into how their content is being used, and control over what they choose to share. That means grounding AEO analysis in actual network-layer signals like real crawl activity and real referral data from Cloudflare’s own infrastructure. Whether a content owner’s goal is to protect and monetize their content, or to maximize discovery in the agentic era, the AEO Suite is designed to serve those interests on their terms. Now, any brand can get the the quality data they need in order to:
- Stop guessing where to invest content: Citation Rate shows which AI platforms are pulling from a brand’s site as a trusted source and which ones are ignoring it. Marketers can direct budget toward testing and optimizing the content and sites that actually drive AI recommendations, not the ones that don’t.
- Diagnose the right problem before spending on the wrong fix: Mention Rate reveals whether AI assistants are naming a brand even when they don’t cite its site. A brand that gets mentioned but not cited has an authority problem, not an awareness problem. That distinction changes the strategy entirely.
- Measure the quality of AI coverage, not just presence: Prominence tracks how much of an AI answer is actually attributed to a brand, and where in the response it appears. A passing mention at the end of a long answer is not the same as a strong, specific recommendation. Marketers get a number that reflects the difference.
- Track competitive position on the questions that matter: Share of Voice shows how a brand stacks up against competitors across the specific questions its customers are asking AI assistants and whether that position is improving or eroding over time.
The AEO Visibility Dashboard Tool joins Agent Readiness, the existing tool in the AEO Suite that checks whether AI systems can find and read a brand’s site in the first place. Agent Readiness checks whether an AI agent can actually reach and use a site – whether it has permission to crawl, a sitemap to navigate, content it can read in a structured format, and, for more advanced use cases, interfaces it can call directly. The AEO Visibility Dashboard then measures what happens downstream: given that agents can reach the site, are they recommending it?
The AEO Visibility Dashboard is available in early access today. Businesses can request access from the Overview tab in the Cloudflare dashboard. Agent Readiness is available in the same location. To learn more, check out the blog below:
