AI Visibility Engine

People don't only Google you anymore. They ask ChatGPT. They ask Claude. They ask Perplexity.

The AI Visibility Engine tracks how your brand shows up across AI answer engines, finds the questions you should own, and writes research-grounded content to earn those answers — every piece routed through a review queue before it goes live.

What it does

The AI Visibility Engine works in two layers.

Layer one — visibility probing. On a regular cadence, the fieldset asks the major AI answer engines the questions your customers ask and records whether — and how — your brand shows up. It probes Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI, then cross-references what it finds with your Google Search Console data to spot the gap between where you rank in classic search and where you appear in AI answers.

Layer two — content generation. From those gaps, the fieldset generates research-grounded content designed to be cited: full blog posts, FAQs, "quick takes," and SEO meta. It grounds each piece in your brand profile and product facts so the content is accurate and brand-true, not generic. Everything lands in a review queue first — nothing publishes automatically.

You can also seed your own topics. When you know a subject your brand should own that the system hasn't detected yet, use Seed a Topic to add it and generate content for it immediately, without waiting for the next probe cycle.

Who it's for

Brands that live or die by being found — and increasingly, by being recommended by an AI. If your customers research before they buy and you want to be the source the answer engines cite, this fieldset is built to measure and improve exactly that.

Prerequisites (required integrations)

Shopify — required. The content layer needs an active Shopify connection (this is where finished articles are published) and a completed Brand Intelligence run for your org. Connect Shopify at Dashboard → Integrations.
Google Search Console — strongly recommended. The visibility layer cross-references AI-answer presence against your real search query and ranking data; without GSC the probe still runs but loses that comparison.

If the prerequisites aren't met when you try to generate, On Belay tells you what's missing and points you to setup.

Setup (step-by-step)

Enable the fieldset. Go to Dashboard → Fieldsets, find AI Visibility Engine, and enable it (admin only). You'll pass through the standard requirement check and consent step.
Connect Shopify at Dashboard → Integrations if it isn't already. Connecting it kicks off Brand Intelligence — a research pass that builds the brand profile every content prompt draws from. Give it a few minutes to complete.
Connect Google Search Console so the visibility probe can compare AI-answer presence with your actual search performance.
Review your prompts and topics. Open the fieldset's pages to check the seeded prompts and the question bank the prober uses. The fieldset ships with proven defaults; refine them to your brand and the topics you most want to own.

Configuration

Manage everything from the AI Visibility Engine pages in the dashboard:

Questions ("Probe questions") — the list of questions the prober asks the answer engines. This is the core of the fieldset; see Probe questions below.
Prompts ("Writing instructions") — editable prompts per content type (blog post, FAQ, quick take, meta) that tune how the engine writes. This is a different control from Questions.
Settings — run options including your Slack delivery channel and your Top products list.
Seed a Topic — the admin-only button (top of the dashboard) to add a topic and generate all four content types for it on the spot.

Probe questions (the question bank)

The AI Visibility Engine runs on a list of probe questions — the natural-language buyer questions it sends to the answer engines (for example, "what's the best espresso machine for a home barista"). This question bank is the core of the fieldset, and it drives both layers:

Probing — twice a week the prober sends every active question to Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI and records, for each question and each engine, whether your brand was mentioned, where it placed, and which competitors and citations showed up.
Content topics — the content generator drafts a piece for questions that don't have one yet, so the questions you're measured on are the same ones you create content to win.

Where the questions come from

When you enable the fieldset (after Brand Intelligence completes), On Belay generates an initial set of about 50 brand-specific questions from your brand profile — your name, site, differentiators, product categories, and competitors — each tagged with a category (comparison, buying guide, category intent, problem/solution, brand-specific) and a funnel stage (awareness, consideration, decision).
The pool tops itself up automatically with new AI-generated questions as the content generator works through it.
You can add your own at any time.

Managing the question list

Open Dashboard → Fieldsets → AI Visibility Engine → Questions (the page is titled "Probe questions"). Any member can view the list; admins can add, edit, and remove questions.

Add and edit — questions are entered and edited inline; each is capped at 500 characters.
Remove — removing a question stops it being probed and used for content. It's a soft delete, so the visibility history already collected for that question stays intact.
Keep a healthy set — aim for at least 10 active questions; the prober needs a reasonable bank for meaningful results, and the page warns you when you drop below five.

Using Seed a Topic also adds that topic to this list for future probing.

Top products

You can tell the AI Visibility Engine which of your products matter most, and it will mention your best-selling products by name in the content it generates. Find this at Dashboard → Fieldsets → AI Visibility Engine → Settings → Top Products. It's optional — content still generates without it — and managing it is admin-only.

How your top products get there depends on your Shopify plan:

Shopify Plus — auto-synced. If your store has Shopify Analytics (ShopifyQL) access, On Belay syncs your top 50 products by net sales and by units sold over the last 365 days, and refreshes them weekly. You'll see two tabs — by revenue and by units sold — and admins can click Sync now to refresh on demand.
Other plans — upload a CSV. If ShopifyQL isn't available, upload a product list instead: open Upload product list, drag in a .csv (up to 500 KB), and save. The uploader reads Shopify's own "Total sales by product" export directly — it looks for product title, vendor, type, and a units or sales column — and keeps the top 50 by units. A preview shows the first rows before you save.

If you're not an admin, you'll see a note asking an admin to upload the list.

How it runs (schedule)

Three cadences run in the background:

Visibility probing runs twice a week — Tuesday and Friday at 10am UTC — probing Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI for your bank of questions.
Content generation runs daily at 12:00 UTC for enrolled orgs, drafting content for detected gaps and seeded topics.
Writeback runs nightly around 2am UTC, publishing only the content you've approved.

You can trigger generation for a specific topic immediately with Seed a Topic rather than waiting for the next cycle.

Review & approval

Generated content collects in the Review Content queue. Each draft — blog post, FAQ, quick take, meta — can be read, edited, and approved. Manually seeded posts carry a "Seeded" badge so you can tell them apart from auto-detected work. Regenerating and editing are unlimited. As with every On Belay fieldset, nothing reaches a live system without a human approval.

Outputs & where they land

Approved articles are published as posts on your Shopify blog, with the SEO title and body HTML the fieldset generated, tagged so they're easy to find later. Associated FAQ and quick-take content is attached to the article.
Visibility results surface inside the fieldset — the probe log and visibility scorecard show how your brand is showing up across the AI answer engines over time.
Slack receives the fieldset's run and visibility summaries on the channel you configure in Settings.

Billing

The AI Visibility Engine is included in your On Belay plan — both the visibility probing and the content layer, with no per-fieldset, per-publish, or usage charges. Generate, revise, and publish freely; the only thing you pay for is your base plan tier, billed through Shopify Managed Pricing on top of your 14-day free trial. See Plans & billing for tier details.

Tips

Connect Search Console early. The whole point of layer one is the gap between classic search and AI answers — GSC is what makes that comparison real.
Seed the topics you already know you should own. Don't wait for the prober to find every gap; if you know a question your brand should answer, seed it and generate now.
Tune the prompts to your voice. Research-grounded doesn't mean generic — the prompt editor is where the content starts sounding like you.
Watch the scorecard over weeks, not days. Visibility moves as your content earns citations; the twice-weekly probe builds the trend that matters.