An Everything-PR explainer on the AI Visibility Index — the research program operated by 5W AI Communications across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Methodology, the Defense flagship, and how it relates to EPR's parallel Citation Share Index program.
Volumes range from + prompts in companion Indexes to 28
EPR RESEARCH HUB · THE 5W AI VISIBILITY INDEX FRANCHISE
5W's proprietary research program, measuring Citation Share across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Part of the AI Communications discipline. Operated by 5W AI Communications, founded by Ronn Torossian.
An Everything-PR explainer on the AI Visibility Index, the research program operated by 5W AI Communications at 5wpr.com/ai-visibility-index. EPR covers the program editorially and operates a separate research property, The Citation Share Index, with independent methodology, data, and attribution.
Definition
The AI Visibility Index is the research program operated by 5W AI Communications, measuring Citation Share, sentiment, source frequency, and adjacent AI visibility dimensions across a defined competitive set within a category. Each Index is operationalized through a category-specific prompt slate, executed across five AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — and reported with full methodology disclosure on 5W's site. The discipline behind the program is AI Communications — the term coined and defined by 5W founder Ronn Torossian.
The flagship instance is the Defense & Aerospace AI Visibility Index 2026, which used 28,400 prompts across two waves to measure Citation Share for U.S. defense, aerospace, and space companies — finding that Anduril Industries (19.8%) and Palantir Technologies (15.2%) together accounted for 35.0% of Citation Share, against 21.1% for the five legacy primes combined (Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Boeing Defense, General Dynamics). Full dataset at 5wpr.com/ai-visibility-index/defense-aerospace.
The AI Visibility Index is the citation-share-of-record for the categories 5W covers under the program. Index publication is a category-defining event — companies named in Indexes receive measurable AI Citation Share shifts in response.
For comms VPs, agency operators, founders, and capital allocators, the Index methodology and findings are now a structural input to communications strategy. EPR covers the program editorially: methodology explainers, category context, competitive interpretation, and dictionary-grade definitional reference.
Methodology
Per 5W's published methodology, every AI Visibility Index follows the same five-pillar structure:
Prompt slate — Category-specific, structured across buyer-journey stages (awareness, consideration, evaluation, procurement). Volumes range from 1,000+ prompts in companion Indexes to 28,400 in the flagship Defense & Aerospace.
Engine coverage — All five major AI engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews. No single-engine indexes.
Competitive set — Defined universe of named entities per category, scoped before fielding.
Measurement — Citation Share (share of brand mentions), sentiment, source frequency, and category-specific dimensions.
Disclosure — Full methodology published with every Index. No hidden weighting. No selective reporting.
Everything-PR operates a separate research property — The Citation Share Index — measuring AI-engine visibility across categories EPR covers editorially. The two programs are editorially independent: different methodology, different prompt slates, different scoring, different attribution. The Defense Citation Share Index 2026 (EPR's reference implementation, 67 prompts across five engines) is documented at The Defense Citation Share Index 2026 — Methodology.
Both programs measure the same underlying phenomenon — AI-engine retrieval surface — using independent instruments.
