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Presence measures search engines alongside AI assistants, because that is still where most of the clicks are and it is the surface AI answers are often drawn from. Silktide asks the search engines you measure the same questions it asks the assistants, reads the results page that comes back, and records where every brand it recognises sat on it.

The rest of this page explains the three decisions behind those numbers: how deep we read, how we compare brands, and what "visible" means in search. For the AI half of Presence, see AI visibility.

We read two pages, and stop

Every measurement covers the first 20 organic results - page 1 and page 2. Nothing below that is recorded, and a brand that ranks 34th reads as Not found.

That is a deliberate limit, not a cost saving in disguise. Almost nobody goes past the first page: the most recent large-scale study of click behaviour puts the first result at around 27% of clicks, the tenth at under 2%, and everything on page 2 together at a rounding error. A position at 34 and a position at 71 are the same outcome for your business - nobody saw either - so recording the difference would only invite you to celebrate moving between them.

Page 2 is recorded because it is the one band below page 1 that is worth acting on. Ranking 14th is striking distance. One improvement to that page can move it onto the results people actually read.

Click share compares brands; average rank does not

Click share is the headline on the screen. It is the share of the available clicks your positions would be expected to win across every question in scope. First place on all of them is 100%. Ranking nowhere is 0%.

It weights each position by what that position is worth, using published click-through rates. First place is worth roughly twice second, and the whole of page 2 is worth almost nothing. Because it counts every question in scope, including the ones you are absent from, it moves in the direction your business does.

Average rank does not, and this is the trap it sets. It averages only the questions you rank for at all - it has to, because a missing brand has no number to average. So losing a poor ranking makes your average rank improve. A brand that drops off five questions where it sat 18th will look like it had a good week. Both numbers are on the screen; click share is the one to compare brands on.

Click share is an estimate from published click-through rates, not measured traffic. For what search engines actually sent you, see Analytics.

Each position from 1 to 20 carries a published click-through rate. For every question in scope, a brand earns the rate for its best position on that page, or zero if it did not appear. Click share is the total earned divided by the total available if that brand had ranked first for everything, expressed as a percentage.

Questions measured on more than one search engine count once per engine, so an engine that read fewer pages contributes proportionally less.

Positions 11 to 20 carry rates near zero. This is why a brand can rank for most of your questions and still hold single-digit click share: page 2 is measured, but it is barely worth anything.

Visible means page 1

Silktide uses visible for one thing, in search and in AI answers alike: you were in front of the person who asked. In an AI answer that means the assistant named you. In search it means page 1, and nothing else.

This matters because Overview shows AI and search standing side by side for each topic. Those columns only mean something if both halves are the same kind of claim. A weighted score mixed with a yes-or-no signal would be neither.

So: page 2 positions are recorded, they appear on the screen, and they feed click share - but they never count as visibility.

Branded and non-branded questions

Questions that name a brand behave nothing like questions that describe a need. You will usually rank first for your own name, so counting those alongside the rest flatters every number and hides the ones you can actually win or lose.

Search rankings therefore defaults to non-branded questions. Switch the Questions filter to see branded terms, or both together. Whether a counts as branded is decided when it is created, and you can see it on the Prompts screen.

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